>> Live from Stanford University. It's the Cube covering global Women in Data Science conference brought to you by Silicon Angle media. >> Welcome back to the Cubes. Continuing coverage of the fourth annual Women and Data Science Conference with Hashtag with twenty nineteen to join the conversation. Lisa Martin joined by one of the speakers on the career panel today at Stanford. Natalie Evans Harris, the cofounder and head of strategic initiatives at right hive. Natalie. It's a pleasure to have you on the program so excited to be here. Thank you. So you have, which I can't believe twenty years experience advancing the public sectors. Strategic use of data. Nearly twenty. I got more. Is your career at the National Security Agency in eighteen months with the Obama administration? You clearly were a child prodigy, of course. Of course, I was born in nineteen ninety two s. So tell me a little bit about how you got involved with was. This is such an interesting movement because that's exactly what it is in such a short time period. They of a mask. You know, they're expecting about twenty thousand people watching the live stream today here from Stanford. But there's also fifty plus countries participating with one hundred fifty plus a regional events. You're here on the career panel. Tell me a little bit about what attracted you to wits and some of the advice and learnings that you're going to deliver this afternoon. Sure, >> absolutely So Wits and the Women and Data Science Program and Conference on what it's evolved to are the exact type of community collective impact initiatives we want to say. When we think about where we want data science to grow, we need to have diversity in the space. There's already been studies that have come out to talk about the majority of innovations and products that come out are built by white men and built by white men. And from that lens you often lose out on the African American experience or divers racial or demographic experiences. So you want communities like women and data science to come together and show we are a part of this community. We do have a voice and a seat at the table, and we can be a part of the conversation and innovation, and that's what we want, right? So to come together and see thousands of people talking and walking into a room of diverse age and diverse experience, it feels good, and it makes me hopeful about the future because people is what the greatest challenge to data science is going to be in the future. >> Let's talk about that because a lot of the topics around data science relate to data privacy and ethics. Cyber security. But if we look at the amount of data that's generated every day, two point five quintillion pieces of data, tremendous amount of impact for the good. You think of cancer research and machine learning in cancer research. But we also think, Wow, we're at this data revolution. I read this block that you co authored it about a year ago called It's time to Talk About Data Ethics, and I found it so interesting because how how do we get control around this when we all know that? Yes, there is so many great applications for data that were that we benefit from every day. But there's also been a lack of transparency on a growing scale. In your perspective, how do what's the human capital element and how does that become influenced to really manage data in a responsible way? I think that >> we're recognizing that data can solve all of these really hard problems and where we're collecting these quintillion bytes of data on a daily basis. So there's acknowledgment that there's things that humans just can't d'oh so a I and machine learning our great ways to increase access to that data so we can use it to start to solve problems. But we also need to recognize is that no matter how good A I gets, there's still humans that need to be a part of that context because the the algorithms air on Lee as strong as the people that have developed them. So we need data scientist. We need women with diverse experiences. We need people with diverse thoughts because they're the ones we're going to create, those algorithms that make the machine learning and the and the algorithms in the technology more powerful, more diverse and more equal. So we need to see more growth and experiences and people and learning the things that I talk about. When I when others asked me and what I'll mention on the career panel is when you think about data science. It's not just about teaching the technical skills. There's this empathy that needs to be a part of it. There's this skill of being able to ask questions in really interesting ways of the data. When I worked at National Security Agency and helped build the data science program there, every data scientist that came into the building, we, of course taught them about working in our vitamins. But we also made every single one of them take a class on asking questions. The same class that we had our intelligence analyst take so the same ways of the history and the foreign language experts needed to learn how to ask questions of data we needed, Our data scientist told. Learn that as well. That's how you start to look beyond just the ones and zeros and start to really think about not just data but the people that are impacted by the use of the data. >> Well, it's really one of the things I find interesting about data. Science is how diverse on I use that word, specifically because we talked about thought diversity. But it's not just the technical skills as you mentioned. It's empathy. It's communication. It's collaboration on DH those air. So it's such a like I said, Diverse opportunity. One of the things I think I read about in your blawg. If we look at okay, we need to not just train the people on how to analyze the data but howto be confident enough to raise their hand and ask questions. How do you also train the people? >> Two. >> Handle data responsibly. You kind of mentioned there's this notion of sort of like a Hippocratic oath that medical doctors take for data scientist. And I thought that was really intriguing. Tell me a little bit more about that. And how do you think that data scientists in training and those that are working now can be trained? Yeah, influenced to actually take something like that in terms of really individualizing that responsibility for ethical treatment of data. So, towards the >> end of my time at the White House, we it was myself deejay Patil and a number of experts and thought leaders in the space of of news and ethics and data science came together and had this conversation about the future of data ethics. And what does it look like? Especially with the rise of fake news and misinformation and all of these things? And born out of that conversation was just this. This realization that if you believe that, inherently people want to do the good thing, want to do the right thing? How do they do that? What does that look like? So I worked with Data for Democracy and Bloomberg to Teo issue a study and just say, Look, data scientist, what keeps you up at night? What are the things that as you as you build these algorithms and you're doing this? Data sharing keeps you up at night. And the things that came out of those conversations and the working groups and the community of practice. Now we're just what you're talking about. How do we communicate responsibly around this? How do we What does it look like to know that we've done enough to protect the data, to secure the data, to, to use the data in the most appropriate ways? And when we >> see a problem, what do >> we do to communicate that problem and address it >> out of >> that community of practice? And those principles really came the starts of what an ethics. Oh, the Hippocratic oath could look like it's a set of principles. It's not the answer, but it's a framework to help guide you down. Your own definition of what ethical behaviour looks like when you use data. Also, it became a starting point for many companies to create their own manifestos and their own goals to say as a company, these are the values that we're going to hold true to as we use data. And then they can create the environments that allow for data scientists to be able to communicate how they feel about what is happening around them and effect change. It's a form of empowerment. Amazing. I love >> that in the last thirty seconds, I just want to get your perspective on. Here we are spring of twenty nineteen. Where are we as a society? Mon data equaling trust? >> Oh, I love that we're having the conversation. And so we're at that point of just recognizing that data's more than ones and zeroes. And it's become such an integral part of who people are. And so we need some rules to this game. We need to recognize that privacy is more than just virus protection, that there is a trust that needs to be built between the individuals, the communities and the companies that are using this data. What the answers are is what we're still figuring out. I argue that a large part of it is just human capital. It's just making sure that you have a diverse set of voices, almost a brain trust as a part of the conversation. So you're not just going to the same three people and saying, What should we d'Oh But you're growing and each one teach one and building this community around collectively solving these problems. Well, >> Natalie's been such a pleasure talking with you today. Thank you so much for spending some time and joining us on the Cuban. Have a great time in the career panel this afternoon. Atwood's. >> Thank you so much. This is a lot of fun. >> Good. My pleasure. We want to thank you. You're watching the Cube from the fourth annual Women and Data Science Conference alive from Stanford University. I'm Lisa Martin. I'll be back with my next guest after a short break

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich for theCUBE. We're now joined by our guest Jonathan Rende. He is the SVP and General Manager of Products at PagerDuty. Thank you very much for joining the program today. >> That's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me, Natalie. Well, Summit 2021, an exciting time for PagerDuty. What are you looking forward to most? >> Well, finally, I'm looking forward to at some point, hopefully, not having to wear my mask in public anymore. I know that's the right thing to do still, and I am doing that, but it seems like things are starting to get back to normal. And because of that, what we're finding is a lot of our customers and clients business practices, especially in certain industries like the hospitality and entertainment, they're coming back as well, and to pre-COVID levels and their same level of usage and everything obviously, that got a little bit dampened during the pandemic. So I'm just looking forward to businesses normal and probably the biggest is talking to my colleagues in three dimensions in person versus two dimensions on a zoom. >> Right. Right. And yeah, I mean, it seems like, unfortunately, not this time we get to see each other in person. But looks like customer service is a big focus at the Summit. Why is it so important right now for companies to provide a seamless customer and digital experience? >> Well, we've learned a lot in the last 12 to 15 months. And one of those is that our historical audiences, developers, ITOps folks who have been on the front lines. And for the, a big part they've been distributed already. Customer service teams have always been on the front lines whenever there's a customer experience problem. And they're no longer working in the office across cubes being able to communicate they're remote now as well. And so with a couple of really interesting things have happened. One with the rise of digital services, the use, the demand on them, heck my own parents are now ordering groceries online, which they never did before. And with the increase with many of our clients and customers, the customer success organizations have to deliver a whole new level of customer experience for that digital experience versus just the brick and mortar in on-premise type of experience. And it's created a whole new set of needs around collaboration, communication. And we've seen that customer service teams are a critical component working with development and IT part of kind of like a three-legged stool that has to work together really well for great customer experience now in the digital age. >> Well, you mentioned this big push for digital and especially in light of the pandemic and what other ways did the pandemic impact customer service? >> So first, like maybe building on what I was just saying, just the collaboration aspect. Most customer service teams have historically that I get an opportunity to work with, they have to work for better, for worse in reactive mode. Cases get opened up, something isn't working, a customer is unhappy, there's a customer satisfaction issue, and so they're pulled in. And those individuals, they're lacking all the contexts that they need, and oftentimes, they're in a world where they have to pull in other individuals. And I think gone are the days where they can pass that customer case off to just another individual and then another individual and another individual, that's incredibly frustrating from a customer business experience. And so this notion of eliminating hand-offs and empowering that individual to be able to reach out to the people that they need and handle that case kind of from beginning to end and communicate directly bidirectionally with engineering teams when they're fixing an issue with electronic shopping cart, digital shopping cart, that's critical. They need to have that flow of information because they're a member of the team so that they can proactively communicate with their clients and give them updates of what's happening. >> Well, last year you announced a customer service solution. What are you announcing this week? >> So a couple of big things, we've recently just made available kind of like a complete in context experience or PagerDuty for customer service app for Zendesk and upcoming with Salesforce. It's really all about an agent, not having to switch out of their help desk, their contact center environment. They can get all the information they need in their world without having to move to other applications. They can instantly know if there's a really important issue in the back office with the systems, with the digital services that they need to be aware of. So we have a whole new set of PagerDuty for customer service products that we've made available. And then also a couple of different options for our customers and how they can consume that. We have a professional version and a business version. And really the difference between the two is if you want your customer service agents to really have full case ownership, to be able to be empowered to do everything, pull in the folks that they want to, they can do that in the business version of our package. >> How and why should DevOps and customer service work together in your opinion? >> So historically, I've always felt that in many times engineering teams will identify because of monitoring and many other technologies that they're using that they'll understand, that there is something that could be customer impacting and they'll work that diligently. Unfortunately, it's been more of a, kind of a stakeholder relationship only with customer service. Yes, they need to know about it. But what we've really worked towards is making sure that customer service is not just the stakeholder, they're an active participant because issues can be identified from customers on the front end or proactively by items issues that are identified in the back office. So being able to be right in the center of the customer world is super, super critical. >> And when you look at the next year and even the next five years, what are you most excited about? >> I think it's really empowering helping our customers, our community, customer service agents on the frontline do more, have more power at their fingertips. I know over and over again, I think, greater value is delivered to customers through those individuals that are contacted not always in the best of times. And there's some amazing statistics out there sets that it takes 10 good experiences to make up for a bad experience if you're a customer. So there's a big impact to this or if there's a particular pricing or product issue that a customer service issue is way more important, way more impactful, will lead somebody to use an alternative service versus the product itself or the pricing of it. It's the service element that's most important. Given all of that, when somebody does in their time of need have a customer service issue, when they do have a positive experience, three quarters of the time, they're super open to sharing that with others. And so if I look at some of that, again, what I'm excited about looking forward is how can we empower those agents to be able from cradle to grave. Take a case that comes in proactively communicate with their customers to provide a great experience to address some of those statistics. And we're really focused on automating that process. It's another truism is that, well, every business wants their customers to exponentially grow. You can't grow your customer service organization exponentially. You can't hire an infinite number of bodies. And so technology plays a really important role in that. And having PagerDuty for customer service as an integrated part of your Salesforce or your Zendesk or your fresh desk implementation will help those teams scale a little quality of life for those agents is important. And we believe that we can really help in that area. Minimize stress disruptions and help them provide better service to their customers. >> Yeah. Well, we touched on a lot of areas in terms of customer service, but another key feature of your role at PagerDuty is in product. So if you could outline some of the key products at PagerDuty and perhaps some insight on what you have in the pipeline. >> Yeah. So outside of just customer service, one of the huge parts of our community are those in ITOps and DevOps. And one of the areas of responsibility I have working with the team that I'm super proud of is what we're doing with what was recently announced last September, our Rundeck acquisitions. So we're announcing something called Runbook actions as a part of the PagerDuty platform. Think of it as a very simple, safe level of automation that every DevOps team can use to better address issues and kind of eliminate a lot of the toil and manual activities when they get pulled into a major event. And so we're releasing this new add on product, very excited about it. It's the first introduction of our Rundeck technology, new as a part of the integrated within the PagerDuty platform. So the reception we've gotten so far in early days has been tremendous and people are really excited, again, to eliminate toil, eliminate a lot of manual activities, allow them to fix items faster when seconds really matter. >> Terrific. Well, really, really appreciate your insights, Jonathan Rende, SVP and General Manager of Products at PagerDuty. Thanks very much for your insights. >> Thank you, Natalie. >> Terrific. And that's all for this session of the PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host Natalie Erlich. Thank you for watching.

(upbeat digital music) >> Welcome to theCube's coverage of PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host for the cube Natalie Erlich. We're joined with a special guest, Sean Mack, the CIO and CSO of Wiley. Thank you very much for joining the program. >> Great to be here, Natalie. Thanks for having me. >> Terrific, well tell us about Wiley. What do you do? >> Sure, Wiley is really wonderful company. Wiley drives the world forward with research in education through publishing and services. We help researchers, professionals, students, universities, and corporations to achieve their goals. Wiley's primarily known as a publishing company, but really now more than ever, we're a tech enabled research and education company, and we have three major areas of impact, research, education, and professional learning. >> Well, obviously the pandemic, the big topic of the last year and hopefully new topics as we move forward, but how has education community evolved during this pandemic? And what's the next step for hybrid learning? >> Yeah, it's been amazing to be part of education and research during this pandemic, during a time when these things have never really been more important. Wiley is a company that's transforming at every level and to many extensive pandemic accelerated those changes and this is nowhere more evident than in the education space. For a long time we'd been building these online and computer-based education platforms and really trying to get folks to move there. And that's been a long, long process and it's been wonderful 'cause we've seen the pandemic has really accelerated that. And we've seen huge increases in usage on our online education platforms, which we've been pushing towards for years. So in many ways it's really enabled us to move forward in a way that that nothing else could have. >> Yeah, I mean, that's really incredible, you mentioned incredible silver lining with the pandemic accelerating digital transformation, especially in education. What do you see as the next phase now that this has really developed over the last year? >> So as I mentioned, we're transforming at every level and at a business level, we just talked a little bit about that. Education is moving more and more to on online and hybrid models. Research, we're moving more and more to open access models where everybody has access to research. Again with the pandemic this has been critical to make sure that we're getting out good medical research and that it's available as widely as possible. But we're also transforming internally. I've been with Wiley about a year and a half now. And when I started, so this is actually prior to COVID, our CEO Brian Napack, said that we're not in a single market that's not going through major disruption, and he's right. And it's so exciting to be part of this company. And on the internally, we have to make sure we're going through a transformation so that we can deliver the products and services that the world's demanding at the speed at which they're demanding them. And so we're also going through transformations from Agile to cloud to DevOps, and it makes it a really exciting place to be as a technologist and also someone who is passionate about education and research. >> Yeah, well terrific. Why did you choose PagerDuty? >> I think there are a few key elements that PagerDuty really enables for us. So as I mentioned, we're going through this DevOps transformation and some of the core competencies, the core principles of DevOps are ones that are enabled by PagerDuty. I think a couple of key ones that I love about it are the ability to empower the users rather than having a centralized service desk that is looking up things and paging out and needs to manage a registry of all the technology people. We can put that power, that control in the hands of what we at Wiley call the functional delivery teams. These teams that are fully responsible for their staff, fully responsible for their research and education solutions that they're delivering. And we using PagerDuty can put that responsibility and empower those teams to take full ownership of their on call schedules, their team management, without having to go through several hops to get there. And I think this also drives another key element, which is that accountability. Look, we're asking these functional delivery teams to take responsibility for their applications and services. We don't work in an environment where we say, "Oh, that's a operations team's responsibility," we're working in a DevOps model. And we can't rightfully ask teams to take responsibility if we don't provide them the tools to be in control of their own fate. And I really think that PagerDuty is a key element of that tool chain, which enables them to manage their full stack and thereby drives that accountability and ownership. >> Yeah, well, I'd love it if you could tell us some of the challenges you were trying to solve by implementing PagerDuty. >> There were several, I think it speaks to some of the underlying principles of DevOps and Agile that we were trying to enable. More than anything it's really about driving better, meantime to resolution when incidents do arrive through faster escalation directly to the right person. And breaking out of this tiered service model where it has to go through a tier one, a tier two, tier three, before the technical issue gets to the right person. Now with PagerDuty, the issue goes directly to the person who can solve it and they're there, they're able to solve it. And we have made huge strides in reducing our meantime to resolution. I have never seen improvements like I've seen in the past year and a half in Wiley using PagerDuty as a part of our overall tool chain. >> Yeah, I mean, if you have a concrete example that something really stood out, we'd love to hear that. >> So I'm not going to go bring up the charts and data to show you, but I'll tell ya the concrete data is there. We track how long it takes us obviously to resolve problems when they occur, and I was blown away by what this team has achieved. And I don't want to take away credit from all the work they've done either. Tools alone doesn't solve any problem, we have amazing technology team, an amazing team willing to take that responsibility. But if you look at the numbers over the past year and a half, in terms of the reduction in time to resolve across every team, it's truly impressive. >> And what are you looking forward to at the summit? >> Well, I'm always excited to hear about what's going on at PagerDuty. I think there are a couple key items or key sessions that I'm excited to see. I'm really looking forward to hearing more about the future of work, the views from the C-suite. I think PagerDuty always has a really unique and fresh perspective, and so I think that's going to be very pertinent and timely as we look to what's coming next in hybrid world. I'm also excited about the what's next in DevOps presentation. Some great folks speaking there. And I think DevOps is maturing and we can... (laughing) for a longest time we were asking, What is DevOps? Can we define it? Can we define it in a consistent way? And I think we're at a point now where we can, and we know the components. So it's a really good time to ask what's next in DevOps. And finally, I'm just excited to hear what's next for PagerDuty. It's been a great tool for us and I'm excited to see where the company is going next. >> Yeah, terrific. Well, let's shift gears a bit. Staying on point with digital transformation. How is that in line with some of the broader organizational goals that Wiley has, such as bridging the higher education gap? >> Yeah, I think that as I mentioned, all our businesses are changing dramatically and we're not going to be able to meet the rapidly changing technology demands, unless we have technologies and teams that can rapidly change with those demands and rapidly expand with those demands. So whether that's auto scaling, whether that's more resilient systems, we need to be there. And I'll also mention the key element that security plays here, because the other change we're seeing is a huge increase in the threat landscape and the depth of some of the attacks we're seeing. And so this focus on security is another important part of the transformation and the transformation from just security to DevSecOps is something that's key for Wiley. It's critical because security for Wiley is security for our customers. And one of the things that we offer is the promise of reliable and secure services. >> And what are some of the innovative ways that Wiley is now delivering content solutions? >> So we're always trying to push the envelope of education in many different ways. I think that there's huge possibilities with AI, machine learning, adaptive learning to really push that envelope to really... I mean, one of the things that I love about being at Wiley is that I get to be involved with education and research. Like my job gets to be helping people learn better, helping people learn quicker. If we can, through technology, make learning easier, let's make it quicker to learn and also look at reducing the cost and availability of that education, we can make an impact around the world, and that's an exciting thing to be part of. >> So in terms of digital transformation, obviously that's a priority for you, security, tell us more about specifically the main points that you're going to be focusing on in this next year in 2021. >> There's a few key key elements that we're focusing on as we go into... It's actually coincidentally the start of our fiscal year, We have a bit of an interesting fiscal year. But that kicks off or just kicked off last month. So we've spent the last four months doing a lot of planning for this year. For me, I think some of the keys are going to be driving agility through simplicity. And one of the places that comes into play is through our tool chain. Making sure we don't have every tool, but we've got the right tools to connect our users, and that, that tool chain is very much interconnected so that we can hit on another key concept for me, which is the enablement of our business. We enable our developers, we enable content editors, we enabled all of Wiley to do the best job they can through technology. We want technology to be seamless for our users. And these three concepts, seamless, enablement and simplicity, agility through simplicity, really work hand in hand to enable our users, our community, to develop, to build at the speed that business demands. >> And obviously, security a really key feature of your role. We don't often think about security going hand in hand with education, but for some of our viewers that are not directly involved in education, why is that so critical? >> Well, I think anyone who's involved with technology today can grasp the criticality of security. Not many days go by that we don't hear of new threats, new ransomware attacks. And Wiley is now more than ever a technology enabled and driven business. When we talk about education, we're talking about technology. When we talk about research, we talk about technology and the underpinning systems and the threats that are out there, impact education and research technology just as they do any other research in education or any other line of business. We have amazing security team at Wiley. I am really blown away by the work this team does every day, and I'm excited about where it's going to. It's so critical for us because we need to provide... If we talk about enabling education for more people in a more effective way around the world, part of that is making sure that all of our users are secure and safe and confident. So we are investing heavily in security and going beyond just spending more money, but really taking a innovative DevSecOps approach, focusing on application security, focusing on making security, not just a team, but part of what everybody in Wiley does because technology can't just be a set of tools and it can't be one team that sits in a dark corner of the environment and tells people what they can't do. Security has to be core to everything we do. And so when we're talking about people building new products and services, we have to make sure that they're part of the security solution. When we talk about our finance users, they need to be part of our security solution. Only by making sure that security is integral to everything we do, are we truly going to be able to make sure we have a secure set of products and services for our users. >> Terrific. Well, thank you so much for your insights and thoughts on PagerDuty Summit as well as digital transformation at Wiley. Really appreciate it, Sean Mack, the CIO and CSO at Wiley. Thank you for joining the program. >> Great, thank you. Thank you so much for having me here. >> And that's all for this session of PagerDuty Summit coverage by "theCube." I'm your host Natalie Elrich. Thanks for watching. (upbeat digital music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty Summit, I'm your host from theCUBE Natalie Erlich. Now we're joined by Sean Scott, the Chief Product Officer at PagerDuty, thank you very much for joining the program. >> Glad to be here, thank you for having me. >> Terrific. Well, you've been with PagerDuty for about six months, how's it going? >> It's going great. So, I joined PagerDuty because I saw the entire world was shifting to digital first and PagerDuty is key infrastructure for many of the world's largest companies, in fact over 60% of the Fortune 100 are customers. And more importantly, I see a much broader future our platform will play in digital operations for these companies going forward, and I'm excited to be part of that. >> Terrific. Well, you have really robust experience, over 20 years in the Valley leading product, marketing, and engineering teams. What prompted the move? I mean, you explained a bit, but just really curious why you made that? >> Sure, so yeah I had a long career at Amazon where I was responsible for much of the shopping experience, I ran the homepage, product page, checkout, a lot of the underlying tools and tech that supports that worldwide across all devices. And then more recently I built and launched the Scout autonomous delivery robot from the ground up, so. But after 15 years, and I was starting to look for a change and I started talking to Jen, our CEO, and the more we talked, the more excited I became about the platform and what it can be going forward for our customers. You know, the fact that we are already integrated with so many customers around the world and playing such a critical role as part of their infrastructure, and yet, I think we're just getting started, and we can help out companies in so many more use cases across our organizations and really eliminate a lot of time and waste from their processes. Well, this is your first PagerDuty Summit, I would love it if you could share perhaps some insight what you're planning to announce this week? >> Yeah, sure. So, we have a few things that we're announcing. One is, we announced last year, probably the biggest news last September was our acquisition of Rundeck; and so as part of that we're announcing our first integration of PagerDuty and Rundeck in the form of Runbook actions. So this is a, you could think of it as kind of quick, kind of micro-automations or short automations to give responders much more insights into what's actually happening with an incident. So maybe it's running a MIM command or a script on a server, we can actually run that directly from the PagerDuty interface so you don't have to SSH into a box for example, which is all just takes time and effort, and so when you're trying to remediate an issue of maybe a site being down or a service being down, it all happens right there. And even your frontline responders can now do those remediations as well, and those automation actions, to again, before they need to escalate to the next tier or bring in other devs to help troubleshoot. So that's pretty exciting. We're also announcing Service Craft, which is a new way to model your services and to show your services, and really understand your dependency graph. So if you think about one of the biggest challenges often when you're trying to remediate an issue is understanding is it me, or is it one of my dependent services? And so now we actually have new visualizations to really show the responders exactly what's happening and you can quickly see is it you, or is it maybe some dependency, maybe multiple teams are having the same issue that because one of the core services that everybody leverages is down and you can quickly see that. So that's pretty exciting as well. We have change correlation and incident outliers. So change correlation, you know, most incidents occur because of changes that were made by us people, and so being able to spotlight things like here's a change that was recently made, or here's a change based on our machine learning algorithms that we detected that could be a culprit here. So providing much richer insights, to again, reduce that mean time to resolution. So this whole team, our Event Intelligence team, that's our whole purpose in life is really just to reduce that mean time to resolution for our customers. Imagine waking up, you know, tomorrow, and your mean time to resolution just magically goes down because of our software updates, and that's how that team focuses on. And then the last one in this group is internet outliers, which is all about telling you if an incident, is this rare, or is this a frequent incident? And just giving you a little more insights into what you're seeing, which will again, help the responders. We have some other announcements coming up, but I'll save that for Summit. >> Perfect. Well, you know, I'd love it if you could share some insight on the competitive landscape, and how PagerDuty is, how you see its product that they're offering different from the others? >> Sure. So, we go head-to-head with a lot of competitors, and we, we have the, you know, being in the fortunate position that we do have a few competitors coming after us and some big names as well. But, you know, when we go head-to-head with these companies, we generally win. And we see we're constantly getting put in bake-offs with these other competitors. We had one customer I was talking to a few weeks back and they paired us against the incumbent, and out of the box, we saw a 50% improvement in mean time to acknowledge, so this is how quickly we can pull in the responder. And then in addition, I thought was more interesting, is we saw a 50% improvement in the mean time to resolution over the incumbent. And so while we do have competitors coming at us, I'm really happy with the way our product performs and our customers are too. So after these bake-offs, it's usually pretty clear who's staying and who's going. >> Yeah, so, when you were helping develop this program this week, what were some of the key areas that you really wanted to highlight? >> Yeah, so one of the big areas is really talking about our vision, and what is our go forward plan. Because I think while we're really known for incident response, I think, you know, some of the exciting things you'll hear about at Summit are kind of where we're going in terms of four pillars to our vision. One is flexibility. Flexible workflows, and enabling flexibility. So, if you think about all the things that our product is doing beyond DevOps. So for example, you know, we had a customer telling us about they had put PagerDuty in front of everything they're doing, so their whole building is IP enabled, and so they had a contractor drill through a water main, and it was instantly able to shut off the water. So they, you know, within 30 seconds, PagerDuty had notified the right responders of building maintenance, and within a minute and a half the water was shut off, and they made the comment that PagerDuty just paid for itself with this one incident. We see IOT device management, we see even organ transplant delivery using our product, and so we want to continue to fuel that with our flexibility. Second pillar is connect to everyone. We see that we have a lot of people connected, but we just launched fairly recently a customer service offering, so now we can get customer service not only informed what's going on, but also connecting to the dev teams, and engineering teams, and the service owners, to really give them more insights into the blast radius and what they may be seeing. The next one is connect everything. So we have over 550 out of the box integrations, and so that makes it seamless to connect to apps like Datadog. But then also we work where our customers work, so we can actually do work in Slack or MS Teams and take action right in those tools. And the last one is automate away to toil. So we want to automate what can be automated, and this goes back to the Rundeck acquisition that I mentioned, and getting that more deeply integrated with the stack, and with processes across an organization. And we're seeing that when our customers really take advantage of that platform they can really automate away to toil, and automate a lot of redundant work, and work that is just busy work that keeps people from doing their day jobs, so to speak. >> Yeah, well, obviously we had a really unusual last year with the pandemic. How do you think that it changed up business for you? Did it inspire you to move in a new direction? What do you see next in the near future? >> For sure. So, I saw that, and it's probably the reason why I came to PagerDuty, because I saw the transformation industries are making to digital first. Right? And so there was a lot of teams, a lot of companies struggled, but then a lot of companies also, florists, you'd take companies like Instacart, and DoorDash, and Zoom, you know, had a terrific year. And so, you know, PagerDuty, even with the pandemic, and companies that were struggling, we still grew pretty rapidly last year, and that's, I think it's pretty exciting, and it really speaks to that migration to digital where digital is now becoming, you know, table stakes, and just part of what you have to do as a business as opposed to it used to be a goal that oh, we need to do more on digital platform, and now it's like, you have to, you know, focus on your digital platform if you want to simply stay relevant today. And so I think that's really important for PagerDuty because that's where we really help companies thrive. >> Sean, that's really interesting. To close out this interview, do you have any last thoughts? >> No, I think that covers it, I think we're, you know, really excited to grow with our customers and we're seeing great traction in the market, and look forward to a bright future, and our platform really helping customers solve new problems that they might've not even considered us for yet. >> Terrific. Well, thank you very much for your insights. Sean Scott, the Chief Product Officer at PagerDuty. And that wraps up our coverage today for the PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host Natalie Erlich for theCUBE. Thank you for watching. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host for "theCUBE", Natalie Erlich. And now we're joined by the CEO and Chairperson for PagerDuty. We're joined by Jennifer Tejada. Thanks very much for joining the program. >> Hi, Natalie. It's great to have you, and "theCUBE", with us again. >> Fantastic, well, let's do an overview of what PagerDuty does and how it's helping its customers. >> Well, PagerDuty is a digital operations management platform. And what that means is that we use software to detect real-time issues and events from the complex ecosystem of technology that's really hard for humans to manage. We then intelligently orchestrate that work to the right teams, the right people with the right expertise, in the moments that matter the most to your business. And that's become especially important as the whole world has moved to a digital-first world. I mean, pretty much everything we do we can experience on demand today but that's only made possible through the complex technology and infrastructure that's managed and operated by responders all over the world. And PagerDuty's digital operation solution communicates issues in real time to ensure a perfect customer experience every time. >> Terrific, and if you could go through some of the key features like on-call management, incident response, event intelligence and analytics, it would be really great. >> Sure, so, our heritage started with automation of the on-call situation for engineers. So, back in the day, many organizations had software engineers building apps, platforms, infrastructure, but then they would throw that over the wall to an ops team who would manage it in production. That led to poor code quality, it led to lots of challenges when people would release software in the middle of the night on a Saturday, et cetera. And it meant that it took a very long time for companies to manually get a problem into the hands of the right person to solve it. We automated all of that using an API-based ecosystem that connects to over 460 of the most popular applications, observability stacks, monitoring systems, security applications, ticketing environments, cloud environments, et cetera. And so, all of that is now seamless. What that data enabled us to do was build an event management solution, which we call Event Intelligence, which now uses AI and machine learning to help responders understand the nature of all the different events coming at them. So, for instance, instead of seeing 100 events coming at you from 16 different monitoring environments in your infrastructure, PagerDuty will use AI to know that of those 175 are part of the same incident. They're events conspiring to becoming a business-impacting incident. And that allows our teams to get ahead of things, to become proactive versus reactive. We've also built analytics into our solution which helps our customers benchmark themselves and their operational efficiency versus their peer group. It helps them measure the health of their teams and understand which services are causing them the biggest challenges and the most expense whether that's labor expense or customer impact. And most recently, we've been really thrilled with our acquisition of Rundeck which helps us automate the remediation of events which now means that PagerDuty can automate incident management and incident response, both upstream, in terms of identifying events as they flow in, and also downstream, safe self-healing of infrastructure, application and platform environments to get things back to the way they need to work in order to serve end customers and serve employees across an enterprise. We're really excited as our vision has expanded to become the ubiquitous platform, the de facto platform, for real-time work. And what we've seen over the years is our customers coming up with very imaginative ways to use our software to solve real-time unstructured, unpredictable work across the company. That can be legal teams managing across different geographies and business units to close contracts at the end of the quarter, it could be financial services companies that are managing their physical security as well as their digital security through PagerDuty where time really, really matters if you have a data breach or a potential physical security incident. It could be customer service where customer service and support teams are working very closely with engineering teams to identify issues that are causing customers problems and to manage those issues collaboratively so that the customer experience is protected. So, just some examples of how PagerDuty is getting leveraged. And we're really excited to talk about some new innovations at Summit. >> Terrific, well, you really have your thumb on the pulse of corporate America, and as you know, last year, we talked about the pandemic and now we're looking at going back to the workforce, we're looking at the future of work. What does that look like for you? >> Well, the future of work is here and one thing is for sure, it has changed permanently. I think we all learned from the past year that remote work can provide a lot of flexibility and can level the playing field for people all around the world. It means you can access talent from different geographies. It means you can have a different level of work-life balance, but it also comes with its own set of complications. And one of the reasons we pulled Summit earlier from September into June was we really wanted to be a part of this kind of grand moment of reopening that we're seeing around the world. And that means that every organization that we're working with is redesigning their future. But that didn't start today, that started several months ago, as companies learned from their remote work experience, learned from their on-demand experience in dealing with their own customers. And it took some of those innovations and brought them forward into kind of the new design for the way teams will work, the way brands interact with their customers. And at Summit, you're going to hear us discuss why now is the moment, now is the moment to harness your digital acceleration because that's really the way that business is getting done. I mean, frankly, every business is now a software business and all business is now digital business. And PagerDuty has proven itself as the essential infrastructure on which all companies, all brands, can build their success. And as we widen our aperture we think about building the platform for not just today's challenges, but tomorrow's challenges. So, at Summit, you'll hear us talking a lot about resilience and how your entire organization and your brand will be judged on your ability to stand up a resilient business, a resilient brand experience for your customers. Today, uptime is money and resilience and reliability are the currency of tomorrow. We're entering into this era where autonomy is everything when it comes to work. I mean, employees, and generally humans, do not want to be stuck managing mundane tasks. And the hybrid work arrangements that we're anticipating mean that PagerDuty's platform will become even more essential for customers because hybrid work drives more complexity. It means your teams are distributed, they maybe distributed across regions, co-located, remote at home, in different time zones. And when something's going down that's really causing a problem in your business, you need to orchestrate work across the right people that can make a difference in that moment. Autonomy and flexibility, frankly, is what people expect from work. And they also expect to engage with apps and platforms that are easy to use, that are intuitive, that deliver really fast time to value. And that has long been at the core of PagerDuty's offering and value proposition. And none of these autonomous or automation investments replace human expertise. They allow our platform to channel that expertise and the expertise of your users to give them context and visibility to make the best possible decisions in the moment that matters. And I think that is so empowering as we think about this flexible new hybrid way of working. And then lastly- >> And I love the points. >> Oh yeah, go ahead. >> Yeah, I love the points that you make about resilience and autonomy. I'd love it if you could just drive a little further how we can build more connection now that we're going into the office and also integrating this kind of hybrid system. >> Well, I think it's really interesting because in some ways I feel super connected to my employees 'cause I'm engaging with them one-to-one, my box and their box. I have had the opportunity to stay connected to customers and executives across the industry over course of the pandemic. And yet, I'm an extrovert, I miss the in-person opportunity that kinetic energy that comes with being together in a room. And I'm looking forward to being back in studio, doing interviews with you, Natalie. But at the same time, I appreciate the convenience that I've gained. Like, I'm not looking forward to commuting again. I mean, I plan to only get on the road during off hours in the future. And I realize that I don't have to travel six hours for a two-hour meeting on the other side of the U.S., or 15 hours to have a meeting in Europe, I can get a lot of business done online. Having said that, that connection is so important. The social contract that you create with your customers and your businesses is so important. And making sure that we can connect the complex technology that runs the world today is also really important. And that's where PagerDuty plays a role. PagerDuty really helps you know who you need, what you can leverage them for, and gets them in touch when you need them, like I said, on the work that is somewhat unpredictable but can be very high priority, the highest priority in the case of a security breach or a major customer-impacting incident. And so, using AI apps, or sorry, using AI and automation to make sure that we can intelligently route work to the right people is a big part of how our platform has come together and really become the central nervous system of the digital economy. >> Yeah, I mean, these are really great points and it's a bit of a silver lining actually with the pandemic, learning that we can really stay connected despite not being in the office and now have more hybrid systems of work. But let's switch now gears to talk about leadership in our communities and how we can truly activate change and a far more just and equitable world. >> Well, I am a huge believer in social responsibility and social impact, and I really appreciate how all of our employees have come together to leverage PagerDuty's platform for good. When we went public, we launched pagerduty.org which was led by Olivia Khalili. And I know you'll hear from her and some of our impact customers this week at Summit, but I think what's really important is how engaging it is for our employee base. Last year, 93% of PagerDuty employees have volunteered their time for social causes and philanthropy. And that's in a time when we were all enduring a hardship of our own, we were all facing an unprecedented pandemic. We've donated over a million dollars in financial grants to over 400 organizations through strategic giving and employee-match programs. And we've opened civic engagement. We've opened source civic engagement with our Day for Change for our employees and our toolkits which we've shared broadly throughout the industry. We signed on to the Board Challenge which I was thrilled to do because I'm a big believer that more diversity in the boardroom is going to lead more equity in corporate America. And thrilled to add Bonita Stewart and Dr. Alec Gallimore to our board last year. And I think representation is so important at the board level, not just because it's the right thing to do, not just because it's the right thing for business, but it's the right thing for career growth for your employees, showing them the path to what's possible for them with your company. And finally, we published PagerDuty's first ever "Inclusion Diversity and Equity Report", which is part of our effort to provide transparency around not just what we're doing, but how we're measuring it, how we're progressing, so that we can get better every year. And we've highlighted our work to support time-critical health, our work to support equity in the response to COVID including vaccine distribution. And I really enjoy some of the impact stories that we hear from our non-for-profit partners that are working with us at pagerduty.org. So, leadership is what you make of it and you can lead from every chair in an organization. And I'm so proud of the leadership, our employees, and many of our customers have demonstrated in this time of particular challenge around the globe. And we're not through it entirely yet, and so, I'm just really hopeful that we can all come out of this better together. >> Right, and speaking about leadership, why do you think that diversity is so critical for effective leadership? >> Well, first of all, I think it's our responsibility to reflect the communities that we serve. My users do not all look the same, they don't come from the same background, they're from over 150 countries around the world. They're solving a diverse set of problems. And in fact, the problems they're solving with our platform is growing every day as they imagine how to apply our technology, our digital operations platform, to different types of real-time work around their companies. But diversity is also important in problem solving, in looking at challenges through different lenses, in thinking about the different stakeholders that you serve in that process, and in creating an equitable community around you, creating opportunity for people around you. I mean, one of the things that we did that was a business decision a couple of years ago was to open an office in Atlanta. And part of that was to create a path, create opportunities for Georgians and people in the Metro Atlanta area to participate in the tech industry. This was before everybody was working from home, before those geographical barriers were broken down. And I'm thrilled to say, we have a thriving community now in Atlanta that's growing and we're hiring. But that's just one example. That was the smart thing to do for our business, but it was also a great thing to do, I think, for the community. And we've brought new minds and all kinds of new people into our business. And this month we're celebrating Pride Month at PagerDuty, which I'm thrilled to do. We have very active LGBTQ community who contribute hugely to our efforts and to our customers' success. And we think that everybody deserves an equal shot at opportunity at the lifestyle they want and the opportunity to build their own bright future. >> Great, and just lastly, what's the main focus for PagerDuty in the next year? >> The main focus for PagerDuty next year is really executing on our strategy to become the defacto platform for real-time work, ensuring that we can leverage the largest domain-agnostic ecosystem of connected apps and services, that we can leverage the largest dataset based on responder data, workflows, events and incidents to help our customers deliver the resiliency, the autonomy, and the connectedness that they're looking for to serve their customers and accelerate their digital prospects and frankly, to prosper in the future. So, it really is about becoming that de facto platform for action for all your real-time, unstructured and important work. >> Well, Jennifer Tejada, the CEO and Chairperson of PagerDuty, loved having you on this program. Really appreciate your insights on diversity and leadership, and, of course, the next phase for PagerDuty itself. I'm your host for "theCUBE" now covering the PagerDuty Summit. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the AWS global public sector partner awards for the award for the most customer obsessed mission-based win in healthcare. I'm your host Natalie Erlich and I'm very pleased to introduce you to our guests Fabian Diaz Segovia the COO and CTO of Nubiral as well as Dr. Mauricio Ferez the CEO and co-founder of Entelai Welcome, gentlemen thank you for joining me. >> Mauricio: Thank you. >> Fabian: Thank you for the invitation. >> Fantastic. Well we'll highlight how AI is revolutionizing healthcare and helping to optimize actions as well as drive key efficiencies. And I want to ask you specifically now on COVID turning it to Mauricio. How is Entelai a support tool for the detection of COVID-19? >> Well, at the beginning of the pandemic we saw the need in Latin America because of the lack of tests and the overload of the health sector to help the frontline doctors using these algorithms working with for chest x-rays to detect those patients that had were suspicious of having COVID-19 and to prioritize them, especially in those contexts where we didn't have enough tests. So we did a very strong or multi centered approach in Latin America, showing that as in other areas the combination of doctors with these technologies provided the high benefit and then trade empowerment of the capacity to detect those patients that are suspicious of COVID-19. And at the beginning of the pandemic when we didn't have POS tests we help doctors to detect COVID-19 cases >> Terrific, and Fabian. And what challenges does the healthcare sector face now in increasing cost efficiency? >> Fabian: Thank you so much for your question. I believe that this last year we have seen a very rapid and energetic world we are living in, in the healthcare sector. We have seen, this suffering of the agility we need to have, in order to adjust to this new conditions. One of the strongest challenges was to respond would that trial systems that can respond to this change that we are seeing every day at Nubiral as a partner company of AWS trust in the technology of AWS to respond with their services and products in an effective and you know not try to worry to this sector that is so special today. >> Natalie: Perfect. Now Mauricio, how can AI speed up times as well as optimized actions? >> Mauricio: Well, in several ways in healthcare, one of the main challenges that we have that affects our region in Latin America but it's also a worldwide concern is the fact that we do not have enough doctors. We have more and more complex studies to carry out and this we know it's that time to return with the report to the patient, it takes too much time. So AI today can help us detect the most important cases, children, which need to be taken care of first. So as to short-term reporting times, especially in pathology like breast cancers or in pathology like dementia where these algorithms can help us measure the brain with that very highly precise way from the neurologist. >> Natalie: And now staying with you Mauricio, I'm really curious how was your software effective in medical image analysis? >> Mauricio: As in all technologies we have a learning curve. And it's interesting to see how as doctors we are usually very eager to acquire new knowledge and improve on our everyday practice because we are committed to that. And we have seen very good receptions of these kinds of technology. And the learning curve was really interesting on behalf of the doctors. Sometimes they were very reluctant, but in general they had a very good adoption of these kinds of technologies. And in this phenomenon we have seen doctors starting to use these tools and they have a great advantage over advanced doctors or centers. That not use the technology because we have more precise reports for the patients in a shorter time in the centers that use this kind of technology. >> Terrific. Now let's switch gears and talk about Nubiral. It provided the cloud infrastructure for a smart diagnostic solution on AWS. Can you give us some more insight on that Fabian? >> Fabian: Basically in our project it was essential to use cloud technology of AWS because of it's implementation of the services. You can very quickly provide services to new clinics new healthcare facilities in a matter of times or minutes from the point where we have the need and until the client has the software. It's very quick and it's easy to do and uh and the value there is the capacity for the clinic or the health care center to have more precise times with results and with AI in the results that delivers to the patient. >> Natalie: Terrific. Now let's talk about Entelai now. It decided to make its solidarity contribution to the COVID-19 pandemic, adapting its AI algorithms for chest radiography. Please give us some more insight on that project, Mauricio >> Mauricio: As we said at the beginning chest x-rays is one of the mostly used uh since studies that we people usually do when it's something that we've been doing for a while. So in the context of the pandemic we decided to retrain by the algorithm taking advantage of that knowledge, it was adjusted to detect COVID-19. This pathology produces damage on the lungs and on the body and that way with DevOps and CT scans we can detect and it's cheap and available in our region. So we believe this could be a could provide a significant uh approach especially in areas, where we didn't have specialists. So we saw that making it available on the, on the web, on the cloud everybody could upload an image and have a recommendation with a trained system, with the equivalent of what would be a specialist. So we believe it was an interesting contribution, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, but we expect to have help patients to receive hourly attention, hourly care >> And shifting gears. Now, a bit I'd like to switch over to Fabian. Could you give us some insight on your business model? >> Yes, Nubiral is the company working hand in hand with AWS We provide professional services to all the companies and clients willing to transform to go for a digital transformation. We accompanied them in this transformation with concrete tools thanks to the solutions and tools that AWS provides. So we can model any case that we use and we can convert it to a digital case and escalate it in a matter of weeks or days this is the power of any business, the agility and quickness with which we can implement a solution. >> Natalie: And I'd like to switch it over now to our other guests. Would you kindly give us some insight now Mauricio on your business model? >> Yeah. We also work in partnership with Nubiral and AWS to generate a model that is cost effective and that is scalable for healthcare facilities. And we usually were the study bubbles we aim at centers that as they need these studies, they can have them available and they can conceive them Just as if it were a micro service of AWS And in this way, we can use the cloud with sources in a very smart way, with very good results for the patient. >> Natalie: And staying with you. Mauricio, just in a few words, give us some understanding of the kind of customer impact that you're seeing. >> Yeah, well, the Entelai focus that we are working on, on the cloud is to change the life of the patients as a company funded by doctors, specialists and computing, our focus are the patient and we change patient lives for the impact that we have in medical practice and the imaging specialists and imaging centers. So we have different new cases of how this technology is changing the lives of the patients. Either for early detection of important diseases like breast cancer or neurodegenerative diseases in the brain, which are sort of are main algorithms we are working with or where they are here in emergencies with chest x-rays the centers that use these algorithms can optimize what patients need to wait in the ER or if they can go home. And it's our traditional cases that where Entelai with AI is helping patients. >> Natalie: And now Fabian, I'd love it for you to weigh in as well. Talk about the impact that you're seeing >> Today. Clients choose those because of the customization that the solution that we've developed, one of the most valuable things of the world we live in is to adjust the client needs because every business is different where is not only one size fits all. With the tools, the a partner like AWS we can send the right solutions that are customized with a big impact and with added value to the client. >> Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me and offering these incredible insights and the impact that your companies are making for people all around the world. That's it for this segment of the AWS global public sector partner awards I'm your host Natalie Erlich. Thanks very much for watching. (bright music)

(bright music) >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards for the award for Best Partner Transformation, Best Cybersecurity Solution. I'm now honored to welcome our next guests, General Keith Alexander, Founder, and Co-CEO of IronNet Cybersecurity, as well as Gil Quiniones, President and CEO of the New York Power Authority. Welcome to the program gentlemen, delighted to have you here. >> Good to be here. >> Terrific. Well, General Alexander, I'd like to start with you. Tell us about the collective defense program or platform and why is it winning awards? >> Well, great question and it's great to have Gil here because it actually started with the energy sector. And the issue that we had is how do we protect the grid? The energy sector CEOs came together with me and several others and said, how do we protect this grid together? Because we can't defend it each by ourselves. We've got to defend it together. And so the strategy that IronNet is using is to go beyond what the conventional way of sharing information known as signature-based solutions to behavioral-based so that we can see the events that are happening, the unknown unknowns, share those among companies and among both small and large in a way that helps us defend because we can anonymize that data. We can also share it with the government. The government can see a tax on our country. That's the future, we believe, of cybersecurity and that collective defense is critical for our energy sector and for all the companies within it. >> Terrific. Well, Gil, I'd like to shift to you. As the CEO of the largest state public power utility in the United States, why do you think it's so important now to have a collective defense approach for utility companies? >> Well, the utility sector lied with the financial sector as number one targets by our adversaries and you can't really solve cybersecurity in silos. We, NYPA, my company, New York Power Authority alone cannot be the only one and other companies doing this in silos. So what's really going to be able to be effective if all of the utilities and even other sectors, financial sectors, telecom sectors cooperate in this collective defense situation. And as we transform the grid, the grid is getting transformed and decentralized. We'll have more electric cars, smart appliances. The grid is going to be more distributed with solar and batteries charging stations. So the threat surface and the threat points will be expanding significantly and it is critical that we address that issue collectively. >> Terrific. Well, General Alexander, with collective defense, what industries and business models are you now disrupting? >> Well, we're doing the energy sector, obviously. Now the defense industrial base, the healthcare sector, as well as international partners along the way. And we have a group of what we call technical and other companies that we also deal with and a series of partner companies, because no company alone can solve this problem, no cybersecurity company alone. So partners like Amazon and others partner with us to help bring this vision to life. >> Terrific. Well, staying with you, what role does data and cloud scale now play in solving these security threats that face the businesses, but also nations? >> That's a great question. Because without the cloud, bringing collective security together is very difficult. But with the cloud, we can move all this information into the cloud. We can correlate and show attacks that are going on against different companies. They can see that company A, B, C or D, it's anonymized, is being hit with the same thing. And the government, we can share that with the government. They can see a tax on critical infrastructure, energy, finance, healthcare, the defense industrial base or the government. In doing that, what we quickly see is a radar picture for cyber. That's what we're trying to build. That's where everybody's coming together. Imagine a future where attacks are coming against our country can be seen at network speed and the same for our allies and sharing that between our nation and our allies begins to broaden that picture, broaden our defensive base and provide insights for companies like NYPA and others. >> Terrific. Well, now Gil, I'd like to move it back to you. If you could describe the utility landscape and the unique threats that both large ones and small ones are facing in terms of cybersecurity and the risks, the populous that live there. >> Well, the power grid is an amazing machine, but it is controlled electronically and more and more digitally. So as I mentioned before, as we transform this grid to be a cleaner grid, to be more of an integrated energy network with solar panels and electric vehicle charging stations and wind farms, the threat is going to be multiple from a cyber perspective. Now we have many smaller utilities. There are towns and cities and villages that own their poles and wires. They're called municipal utilities, rural cooperative systems, and they are not as sophisticated and well-resourced as a company like the New York Power Authority or our investor on utilities across the nation. But as the saying goes, we're only as strong as our weakest link. And so we need- >> Terrific. >> we need to address the issues of our smaller utilities as well. >> Yeah, terrific. Do you see a potential for more collaboration between the larger utilities and the smaller ones? What do you see as the next phase of defense? >> Well, in fact, General Alexander's company, IronNet and NYPA are working together to help bring in the 51 smaller utilities here in New York in their collective defense tool, the IronDefense or the IronDome as we call it here in New York. We had a meeting the other day, where even thinking about bringing in critical state agencies and authorities. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and other relevant critical infrastructure state agencies to be in this cloud and to be in this radar of cybersecurity. And the beauty of what IronNet is bringing to this arrangement is they're trying to develop a product that can be scalable and affordable by those smaller utilities. I think that's important because if we can achieve that, then we can replicate this across the country where you have a lot of smaller utilities and rural cooperative systems. >> Yeah. Terrific. Well, Gil, staying with you. I'd love to learn more about what was the solution that worked so well for you? >> In cybersecurity, you need public-private partnerships. So we have private companies like IronNet that we're partnering with and others, but also partnering with state and federal government because they have a lot of resources. So the key to all of this is bringing all of that information together and being able to react, the General mentioned, network speed, we call it machine speed, has to be quick and we need to protect and or isolate and be able to recover it and be resilient. So that's the beauty of this solution that we're currently developing here in New York. >> Terrific. Well, thank you for those points. Shifting back to General Alexander. With your depth of experience in the defense sector, in your view, how can we stay in front of the attacks, mitigate them, and then respond to them before any damage is done? >> So having run our nations, the offense. I know that the offense has the upper hand almost entirely because every company and every agency defends itself as an isolated entity. Think about 50 mid-sized companies, each with 10 people, they're all defending themselves and they depend on that defense individually and they're being attacked individually. Now take those 50 companies and their 10 people each and put them together and collect the defense where they share information, they share knowledge. This is the way to get out in front of the offense, the attackers that you just asked about. And when people start working together, that knowledge sharing and crowdsourcing is a solution for the future because it allows us to work together where now you have a unified approach between the public and private sectors that can share information and defend each of the sectors together. That is the future of cybersecurity. What makes it possible is the cloud, by being able to share this information into the cloud and move it around the cloud. So what Amazon has done with AWS has exactly that. It gives us the platform that allows us to now share that information and to go at network speed and share it with the government in an anonymized way. I believe that will change radically how we think about cybersecurity. >> Yeah. Terrific. Well, you mention data sharing, but how is it now a common tactic to get the best out of the data? And now, how is it sharing data among companies accelerated or changed over the past year? And what does it look like going forward when we think about moving out of the pandemic? >> So first, this issue of sharing data, there's two types of data. One about the known threats. So sharing that everybody knows because they use a signature-based system and a set of rules. That shared and that's the common approach to it. We need to go beyond that and share the unknown. And the way to share the unknown is with behavioral analytics. Detect behaviors out there that are anonymous or anomalous, are suspicious and are malicious and share those and get an understanding for what's going on in company A and see if there's correlations in B, C and D that give you insights to suspicious activity. Like solar winds, recognizes solar winds at 18,000 companies, each defending themselves. None of them were able to recognize that. Using our tools, we did recognize it in three of our companies. So what you can begin to see is a platform that can now expand and work at network speed to defend against these types of attacks. But you have to be able to see that information, the unknown unknowns, and quickly bring people together to understand what that means. Is this bad? Is this suspicious? What do I need to know about this? And if I can share that information anonymized with the government, they can reach in and say, this is bad. You need to do something about it. And we'll take the responsibility from here to block that from hitting our nation or hitting our allies. I think that's the key part about cybersecurity for the future. >> Terrific. General Alexander, ransomware of course, is the hottest topic at the moment. What do you see as the solution to that growing threat? >> So I think, a couple things on ransomware. First, doing what we're talking about here to detect the phishing and the other ways they get in is an advanced way. So protect yourself like that. But I think we have to go beyond, we have to attribute who's doing it, where they're doing it from and hold them accountable. So helping provide that information to our government as it's going on and going after these guys, making them pay a price is part of the future. It's too easy today. Look at what happened with the DarkSide and others. They hit Colonial Pipeline and they said, oh, we're not going to do that anymore. Then they hit a company in Japan and prior to that, they hit a company in Norway. So they're attacking and they pretty much operate at will. Now, let's indict some of them, hold them accountable, get other governments to come in on this. That's the way we stop it. And that requires us to work together, both the public and private sector. It means having these advanced tools, but also that public and private partnership. And I think we have to change the rhetoric. The first approach everybody takes is, Colonial, why did you let this happen? They're a victim. If they were hit with missiles, we wouldn't be asking that, but these were nation state like actors going after them. So now our government and the private sector have to work together and we need to change that to say, they're victim, and we're going to go after the guys that did this as a nation and with our allies. I think that's the way to solve it. >> Yeah. Well, terrific. Thank you so much for those insights. Gil, I'd also like to ask you some key questions and of course, certainly people today have a lot of concerns about security, but also about data sharing. How are you addressing those concerns? >> Well, data governance is critical for a utility like the New York Power Authority. A few years ago, we declared that we aspire to be the first end-to-end digital utility. And so by definition, protecting the data of our system, our industrial controls, and the data of our customers are paramount to us. So data governance, considering data or treating data as an asset, like a physical asset is very, very important. So we in our cybersecurity, plans that is a top priority for us. >> Yeah. And Gil thinking about industry 4.0, how has the surface area changed with Cloud and IoT? >> Well, it's grown significantly. At the power authority, we're installing sensors and smart meters at our power plants, at our substations and transmission lines, so that we can monitor them real time, all the time, know their health, know their status. Our customers we're monitoring about 15 to 20,000 state and local government buildings across our states. So just imagine the amount of data that we're streaming real time, all the time into our integrated smart operations center. So it's increasing and it will only increase with 5G, with quantum computing. This is just going to increase and we need to be prepared and integrate cyber into every part of what we do from beginning to end of our processes. >> Yeah. And to both of you actually, as we see industry 4.0 develop even further, are you more concerned about malign actors developing more sophistication? What steps can we take to really be ahead of them? Let's start with General Alexander. >> So, I think the key differentiator and what the energy sector is doing, the approach to cybersecurity is led by CEOs. So you bring CEOs like Gil Quiniones in, you've got other CEOs that are actually bringing together forums to talk about cybersecurity. It is CEO led. That the first part. And then the second part is how do we train and work together, that collective defense. How do we actually do this? I think that's another one that NYPA is leading with West Point in the Army Cyber Institute. How can we start to bring this training session together and train to defend ourselves? This is an area where we can uplift our people that are working in this process, our cyber analysts if you will at the security operations center level. By training them, giving them hard tests and continuing to go. That approach will uplift our cybersecurity and our cyber defense to the point where we can now stop these types of attacks. So I think CEO led, bring in companies that give us the good and bad about our products. We'd like to hear the good, we need to hear the bad, and we needed to improve that, and then how do we train and work together. I think that's part of that solution to the future. >> And Gil, what are your thoughts as we embrace industry 4.0? Are you worried that this malign actors are going to build up their own sophistication and strategy in terms of data breaches and cyber attacks against our utility systems? What can we do to really step up our game? >> Well, as the General said, the good thing with the energy sector is that on the foundational level, we're the only sector with mandatory regulatory requirements that we need to meet. So we are regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation to meet certain standards in cyber and critical infrastructure. But as the General said, the good thing with the utility is by design, just like storms, we're used to working with each other. So this is just an extension of that storm restoration and other areas where we work all the time together. So we are naturally working together when it comes to to cyber. We work very closely with our federal government partners, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Energy and the National Labs. The National Labs have a lot of expertise. And with the private sector, like great companies like IronNet, NYPA, we stood up an excellence, center of excellence with private partners like IronNet and Siemens and others to start really advancing the art of the possible and the technology innovation in this area. And as the governor mentioned, we partnered with West Point because just like any sporting or just any sport, actual exercises of the red team, green team, and doing that constantly, tabletop exercises, and having others try and breach your walls. Those are good exercises to really be ready against the adversaries. >> Yeah. Terrific. Thank you so much for those insights. General Alexander, now I'd like to ask you this question. Can you share the innovation strategy as the world moves out of the pandemic? Are we seeing new threats, new realities? >> Well, I think, it's not just coming out of the pandemic, but the pandemic actually brought a lot of people into video teleconferences like we are right here. So more people are working from home. You add in the 5G that Gil talked about that gives you a huge attack surface. You're thinking now about instead of a hundred devices per square kilometer up to a million devices. And so you're increasing the attack surface. Everything is changing. So as we come out of the pandemic, people are going to work more from home. You're going to have this attack surface that's going on, it's growing, it's changing, it's challenging. We have to be really good about now, how we trained together, how we think about this new area and we have to continue to innovate, not only what are the cyber tools that we need for the IT side, the internet and the OT side, operational technology. So those kinds of issues are facing all of us and it's a constantly changing environment. So that's where that education, that training, that communication, working between companies, the customers, the NYPA's and the IronNet's and others and then working with the government to make sure that we're all in sync. It's going to grow and is growing at an increased rate exponentially. >> Terrific. Thank you for that. Now, Gil, same question for you. As a result of this pandemic, do you see any kind of new realities emerging? What is your position? >> Well, as the General said, most likely, many companies will be having this hybrid setup. And for company's life like mine, I'm thinking about, okay, how many employees do I have that can access our industrial controls in our power plants, in our substations, and transmission system remotely? And what will that mean from a risk perspective, but even on the IT side, our business information technology. You mentioned about the Colonial Pipeline type situation. How do we now really make sure that our cyber hygiene of our employees is always up-to-date and that we're always vigilant from potential entry whether it's through phishing or other techniques that our adversaries are using. Those are the kinds of things that keep myself like a CEO of a utility up at night. >> Yeah. Well, shifting gears a bit, this question for General Alexander. How come supply chain is such an issue? >> Well, the supply chain, of course, for a company like NYPA, you have hundreds or thousands of companies that you work with. Each of them have different ways of communicating with your company. And in those communications, you now get threats. If they get infected and they reach out to you, they're normally considered okay to talk to, but at the same time that threat could come in. So you have both suppliers that help you do your job. And smaller companies that Gil has, he's got the 47 munis and four co-ops out there, 51, that he's got to deal with and then all the state agencies. So his ecosystem has all these different companies that are part of his larger network. And when you think about that larger network, the issue becomes, how am I going to defend that? And I think, as Gil mentioned earlier, if we put them all together and we operate and train together and we defend together, then we know that we're doing the best we can, especially for those smaller companies, the munis and co-ops that don't have the people and a security ops centers and other things to defend them. But working together, we can help defend them collectively. >> Terrific. And I'd also like to ask you a bit more on IronDefense. You spoke about its behavioral capabilities, it's behavioral detection techniques, excuse me. How is it really different from the rest of the competitive landscape? What sets it apart from traditional cybersecurity tools? >> So traditional cybersecurity tools use what we call a signature-based system. Think of that as a barcode for the threat. It's a specific barcode. We use that barcode to identify the threat at the firewall or at the endpoint. Those are known threats. We can stop those and we do a really good job. We share those indicators of compromise in those barcodes, in the rules that we have, Suricata rules and others, those go out. The issue becomes, what about the things we don't know about? And to detect those, you need behavioral analytics. Behavioral analytics are a little bit noisier. So you want to collect all the data and anomalies with behavioral analytics using an expert system to sort them out and then use collected defense to share knowledge and actually look across those. And the great thing about behavioral analytics is you can detect all of the anomalies. You can share very quickly and you can operate at network speed. So that's going to be the future where you start to share that, and that becomes the engine if you will for the future radar picture for cybersecurity. You add in, as we have already machine learning and AI, artificial intelligence, people talk about that, but in this case, it's a clustering algorithms about all those events and the ways of looking at it that allow you to up that speed, up your confidence in and whether it's malicious, suspicious or benign and share that. I think that is part of that future that we're talking about. You've got to have that and the government can come in and say, you missed something. Here's something you should be concerned about. And up the call from suspicious to malicious that gives everybody in the nation and our allies insights, okay, that's bad. Let's defend against it. >> Yeah. Terrific. Well, how does the type of technology address the President's May 2021 executive order on cybersecurity as you mentioned the government? >> So there's two parts of that. And I think one of the things that I liked about the executive order is it talked about, in the first page, the public-private partnership. That's the key. We got to partner together. And the other thing it went into that was really key is how do we now bring in the IT infrastructure, what our company does with the OT companies like Dragos, how do we work together for the collective defense for the energy sector and other key parts. So I think it is hit two key parts. It also goes on about what you do about the supply chain for software were all needed, but that's a little bit outside what we're talking about here today. The real key is how we work together between the public and private sector. And I think it did a good job in that area. >> Terrific. Well, thank you so much for your insights and to you as well, Gil, really lovely to have you both on this program. That was General Keith Alexander, Founder and Co-CEO of IronNet Cybersecurity, as well as Gil Quiniones, the President and CEO of the New York Power Authority. That's all for this session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm your host for theCUBE, Natalie Erlich. Stay with us for more coverage. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to today's session of the AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm delighted to introduce our next guests to highlight the award for Best Partner Transformation, Best Telco Solution, and of course, I'm your host Natalie Erlich for theCUBE. We are now joined by Avishai Sharlin Division President at Amdocs Technology, and Ralf Hellenbran, Program Director of Technology at Vodafone Germany. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining the program. >> Thank you for having us. >> Our pleasure. >> Let's have the opening question for both of you. You know, but let's first start with Avishai. What has been the highlight to date in the journey of both Amdocs and Vodafone? >> Well, it's a good question. I believe that the highlight was the teaming and getting things done together as partners. Unlike many previous experiences, this time, we understood that success equals us working hand in hand together, making sure that we overcome and achieve everything as true partners. So the greatest obstacles and also the biggest achievement were done together as one team. We always speak about the hurdles, we negotiate sometimes. But eventually, we're coming to the solution together, and making sure that everything is properly managed and properly done in the right timing, and according to plans. >> Terrific, well, Ralf, let's go to you. What do you see as the highlights of this collaboration. >> Now exactly what Avishai said, but let me add to that. What we are following is a real collaborative approach. Now, there's a lot of strengths in that approach. Because we are using for example, swarm intelligence, we are using elements, which you see in clouds attempts as well, for example, yeah, but you see it in agile attempts and agile working methods. And this is what we applied. And as Avishai said, we are doing that as real partners in the program. And we are pulling a lot of strengths out of that by detecting problems early, we have a high level of transparency, we put everything on the table, and differences that we do not fight about the problems. We work collaborative on the solution. And that's really kind of new to the industry we are working in. And that's kind of game changing for it. At the beginning, we said it will be game changing if it works. Now we see that it does. >> Terrific. Well, why do you think generally speaking, that the Telco industry has been so slow, to you know, embrace these kinds of innovations? Let's start with Avishai. >> Yeah. It's less about I think the actual technology, it's more about a handful of parameters that need to be aligned, once you are trying to address these big transformations. You need to upskill a lot of people, you need to educate your manpower, to new technologies and new ways and processes, how to embrace DevOps, how to work in a cloud environment, how to embrace an agile, safe methodology. So there are many small pockets of things that needs to be changed. Not a single element, actually is the same as like five years ago. So in a way, if the organization as a whole, is not being transformed, it's very tough to embrace all those new technologies and succeed in such a journey. So for us, and I think also to our partners in Vodafone, it was a mutual understanding that we need to not just work together, but also tackle the new technologies and methods and processes all together and change the entire organization and ecosystem in order to succeed. In many other cases in the industry, we see that some pockets are not being changed. And then even if the technology is right, you're missing the upscaling of people, if you upskill the people and you forgot the technology, and so on so forth. >> Perfect now, Ralf, I'd love for you to respond to that question as well. >> So the Telco industry is a quite complex industry, that you look to the product it seems to be quite easy. You pick up a phone and you do a phone call or you go to the internet and so on and so forth. But if you think of all the services, which you're using via your smartphone, for example, yeah, it's far away from just doing a phone call. So at the same time where the Telco industry is producing and selling products, it's producing and selling services. At the same time, while you're using it for leisure, you're also using it for emergency calls. So there's a high level of safety, which we need to bring, and we need to pair it with a lot of innovation elements, right, both together. Now, if you take all this and you think of the complexity, it's not easy to introduce new methods and new ways of working, etc, to such an industry, again you need to take two things into account, you need to make it very safe and stable and educated and controlled. And at the same time, you need to be very fast, because it's a fast moving industry. And both together explains how we adopt it and why sometimes we are a bit slower than others, because the trial and error, yeah, it's not that easy, because the error cannot be allowed in big scale. The more I'm happy that in the approach we're taking together with Amdocs and also AWS, we can apply these new methods while keeping the safety and stability. >> Terrific, well, thank you for outlining that safety methodology. Avishai, I'd like to move this back to you. How are you redefining this operation through DevOps and automation? >> Oh, that's an interesting question. I think that automation, needs to be baked into almost everything that we're doing in such a transformation. It's not from the basic technology stuff, but it goes into all the processes, the way you develop, the way you test. The way you deploy, the way later on, you're making sure that everything run in the right way. So automation is key fundamental element in the end to end journey of such a big transformation, especially if you're going into agile development, and you need to fail fast, react fast, change fast, and then continue onwards with a new solution. So first, as you rightfully said, it's automation. And DevOps is also key over here, because you need to make sure that what you develop is also something that you deploy in the right way. So you need to put in place all the right mechanism, such as (indistinct), and the cloud frameworks, and the relevant different technologies that are adhering into this end to end solution. >> Perfect, now, Ralf, what are your thoughts? How are you redefining the operation now through DevOps and automation? >> We are trying to solve the paradox. Again, the paradox is we want to have things very stable, that would dictate us to do very detailed plans and to adhere to it and so on this is what we did in the past, it fostered for example, taylorism, and similar things. Now, we want to go a step further, we want to apply agile methods, we want to dismantle the taylorism. And the techniques around DevOps, cloud operation, etc, agile methods help us to do that. Now, while we are transforming our way of working, we don't want to lose the good elements of what we have been doing before, we want to do a step forward and not at the same time step back. And therefore we are combining things. And automation, for example, is one way to do that. DevOps is another way to do that. We are joining the good thinking of operations and the good thinking of development together, and we are pulling additional strengths out of that, while not taking into account or taking on board the weaknesses of the former approach. So it's a stepwise transformation we are following. Automation helps us to focus on the real problems, and not on the things you can automate by technology. >> Terrific. Well, now Avishai, bringing this back to you, Ralf talks about agility and also DevOps, explain the journey today on such a large program. >> The the journey, in what sense? Can you give me some coloring? >> Yeah tell us about this collaboration and keeping that in mind, keeping in mind agility as well as DevOps. You know, the step by step process in developing such a large collaborative program. >> Thank you for clarification. So I think that the journey as a whole had several components, (indistinct) and myself also the beginning about the nature of being true partners here. But it is also about establishing something very new in the industry. Many of the things that we're working are, you know, the first time that we're doing agile manner of developing software and testing, it's so fast, it's the first time we're implementing the latest and greatest DevOps technologies. The first time, we're adhering into new standards and way and behavior from a modernized technology organization. So in a way, this journey is all about a mixture of innovation, new stuff, on one hand, aligned with a very, very tight in a good way, I would call it German engineering, in the sense of making sure the things are in place and making sure that the processes are well defined. And we're seeing at any given point, the different status we're in, what needs to be improved, what is going well, and what future lies ahead. >> Staying with that topic on the journey opening to both of you, and perhaps Ralf would like to jump in here, first, how have AWS technologies been featured as part of this journey. >> AWS has been chosen wisely by us because of its technology components brought to the table. Now, without now pointing to a particular service, which we are using, we talked about automation, we talked about DevOps, now everyone can itself about how AWS in general helps to foster that, the sheer fact that we can merge the different way of working with a different mindset of people working in our collaboration and technology components coming not only, but also from AWS, this is ensuring our success. If you would pull out one of these elements, yeah, out of the equation, that most probably it would not work. I have problems to rate which element is more important, they are all part of the puzzle and otherwise, you will not see the picture and create the picture. So in a nutshell, we are utilizing the AWS technologies in order to allow the speed of development, lots of first times which we have in our collaboration, and the AWS technologies are an essential part of that. >> Terrific and Avishai, what are your thoughts on that? >> I think that the collaboration with AWS goes in several, in a way different shapes and form. On the technology, pure technology level, we're utilizing native EKS, we're moving with the managed Kubernetes. We're using, you know the latest technology in databases, and many other very, very cool technologies coming from AWS. And on a different level, completely different level, I think that AWS understands the behavior of complex enterprise and are assisting us with programs, looking into well architected framework and how to work in a managed environment and what are the technologies that we need to utilize. And also in, from an Amdocs perspective, something that assisted us a lot in this journey, we have a unique technology which defines an end to end solution to development within a micro service cloud native environment, we'll call it M360. AWS assisted a lot in making this a mature technology and allowing us to develop faster and fully utilize the benefits of cloud native environments. >> Terrific, now to both of you, what do you see as the next step in your collaboration together? Let's bring this to Ralf. >> There is no distinct next step. And maybe this is the consequence of the way of working we have established. There are many small steps we will pursue and most probably, if you want to know, which are the next steps, you need to talk to our teams. This is another aspect of this new way of working, which we apply. The people working in that approach, they tell us how they construct, how they structure this approach. If I would summarize it, we are constantly tearing down the walls between the companies, between silos, between departments working in that collaboration, and we are getting more close together every day. And solving problems quicker, we are getting them quicker on the table, we are getting them quicker, and softer, faster, soft, and AWS, Amdocs are part of this. And this is really nice to see and be part of, that this is really happening. So the next step is, foster the collaboration. >> Avishai do you have any thoughts? >> Yeah, on a personal level, I think the next step would be to glide together in Europe. But on a more serious note, I think that this is becoming like a true partnership. And I think that I see a lot of empowerment coming from both sides, allowing the team to develop together, to think together and to start to create new stuff, that even if you plan ahead, you will never achieve without true collaboration. So this empowerment, the fact that the teams feel that they can do things on their own, and make one and one equals three, two, or you know, or seven, is the big change that I see in front of us. And I really feel it in the air. And I also feel it in in the way we act and we move forward. >> Yeah, so Ralf, how do you see that this program will enable continuous innovation? >> Oh, it does already. So if you're looking to big transformation programs of the past, (indistinct) beside the fact that lots of them actually did not achieve what they are, what they were asked to achieve. Usually big programs, do big plans, and then you have a very long period of preparation. And then usually you have a rather big bank or life and then everything shall be fun. That sometimes work but not most times, it's difficult. Now within our program, we are doing that in collaboration, but step by step by step. And it's more an evolution than a revolution, which we are doing. At least in the way we deploy things, again, we are back to DevOps, continuous integration, continuous deployment and so on all these elements, which you can see in these approaches. And this is where the wheel spinning slice. So it's evolving step by step. And it's bringing benefits step by steps. So the benefits are already in place into to a certain extent, and they're constantly growing. >> Terrific, Avishai, what are your thoughts? How do you see the innovation of being able to continue and even further? >> In a way we're in a world that everything is in continuum, so it's continuous delivery, and continuous development and also continuous innovation. As long as you know, the ecosystem of ours continues to innovate as a whole, we are part of it. And inevitably, we are part of the larger ecosystem on one hand, and also players within it on a smaller scale in this project and as organization. So I think innovation is baked into everything we're doing today. Sometime it's small incremental steps, sometimes it's big, innovative moves, but all in all, it's something that is currently part of our DNA. >> And how is this system helping you both you know, be more proactive? Either one of you who would like to go first? >> No, I started first. >> Avishai? Okay. So, we are data driven, we are way more data driven. And by knowing exactly what is happening, we can be faster, we can be more innovative, we can be more productive. So, in cases where we either discover a problem or we discovering opportunity, we are much faster in analyzing whether it's really one, how should we redirect on that? How can we solve it or utilize it? And that's really working well. >> Perfect. And, you know, Avishai, feel free to join in on that too. >> In the digitized economy, I think that productivity comes a lot from the business side. If there is something that completely changed lately is the fact that business people are driving many, many changes on one end, and technology is here to adhere on one end and flexible to to move forward. So many of the productive concepts are coming from non technology savvy people, and the ability of what we're doing together to adjust and support different business behaviors and business models, and also, you know, business initiatives is thought of as being productive and being able to adapt into the digitalized economy. >> Let me join in on that one, what Avishai said, Let's think of a business person who wants to change something, and you don't know whether it's a white way as a corporation. Now you bring in the technology bits and pieces from different angles, and all of a sudden, you can combine it with a data driven approach, then, you know much better how to react on this business demand and how to bring it to life by using technology. Yeah, that might be a very high level of example of what we're doing here. Again, collaboration, get it done together with is the theme of that, technology is a very important part of that, paired with the business. >> Yeah, we talked on some very broad terms like themes, collaboration, innovation, I just want to focus a bit now on automation. Why do you think it is so critical to the vision of this program, Avishai. >> First of all, because it ends with ation, and everything that has this, but what I think that we started with this, automation is fundamental to everything that needs to be nimble, everything that needs to be fast. You cannot do it manually. And if you want to react either to a business demand or to a data driven decision, analytic decision, if you want to adopt new technology, if you want to test a new business scenario or technology scenario, you need automation to be part, inevitable part of everything that you're doing. So automation is a key element in everything that we're doing. And it's critical part of also the way to look into the future and to make sure that everything is working the right way. >> Perfect Ralf, any quick thoughts on that? >> Actually, nothing, nothing to add. >> All right, terrific. Well, it's been so wonderful to have you on the program. I know people are coming in from all over the world to join us. Really fantastic opportunity to highlight this important innovation in the Telco sector. Glad to have you here. Ralf Hellenbran, Program Director of Technology at Vodafone Germany, as well as Avishai Sharlin, the Division President at Amdocs Technology. we're highlighting the award that they won as part of the AWS, Global Public Sector Partner Awards. So great to have you on the show. And I'm your host Natalie Erlich, do stay tuned for more coverage. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the AWS global public sector partner awards for the award for the most customer obsessed mission-based win in healthcare. I'm your host Natalie Erlich and I'm very pleased to introduce you to our guests Fabian Diaz Segovia the COO and CTO of Nubiral as well as Dr. Mauricio Ferez the CEO and co-founder of Entelai Welcome, gentlemen thank you for joining me. >> Mauricio: Thank you. >> Fabian: Thank you for the invitation. >> Fantastic. Well we'll highlight how AI is revolutionizing healthcare and helping to optimize actions as well as drive key efficiencies. And I want to ask you specifically now on COVID turning it to Mauricio. How is Entelai a support tool for the detection of COVID-19? >> Well, at the beginning of the pandemic we saw the need in Latin America because of the lack of tests and the overload of the health sector to help the frontline doctors using these algorithms working with for chest x-rays to detect those patients that had were suspicious of having COVID-19 and to prioritize them, especially in those contexts where we didn't have enough tests. So we did a very strong or multi centered approach in Latin America, showing that as in other areas the combination of doctors with these technologies provided the high benefit and then trade empowerment of the capacity to detect those patients that are suspicious of COVID-19. And at the beginning of the pandemic when we didn't have POS tests we help doctors to detect COVID-19 cases >> Terrific, and Fabian. And what challenges does the healthcare sector face now in increasing cost efficiency? >> Fabian: Thank you so much for your question. I believe that this last year we have seen a very rapid and energetic world we are living in, in the healthcare sector. We have seen, this suffering of the agility we need to have, in order to adjust to this new conditions. One of the strongest challenges was to respond would that trial systems that can respond to this change that we are seeing every day at Nubiral as a partner company of AWS trust in the technology of AWS to respond with their services and products in an effective and you know not try to worry to this sector that is so special today. >> Natalie: Perfect. Now Mauricio, how can AI speed up times as well as optimized actions? >> Mauricio: Well, in several ways in healthcare, one of the main challenges that we have that affects our region in Latin America but it's also a worldwide concern is the fact that we do not have enough doctors. We have more and more complex studies to carry out and this we know it's that time to return with the report to the patient, it takes too much time. So AI today can help us detect the most important cases, children, which need to be taken care of first. So as to short-term reporting times, especially in pathology like breast cancers or in pathology like dementia where these algorithms can help us measure the brain with that very highly precise way from the neurologist. >> Natalie: And now staying with you Mauricio, I'm really curious how was your software effective in medical image analysis? >> Mauricio: As in all technologies we have a learning curve. And it's interesting to see how as doctors we are usually very eager to acquire new knowledge and improve on our everyday practice because we are committed to that. And we have seen very good receptions of these kinds of technology. And the learning curve was really interesting on behalf of the doctors. Sometimes they were very reluctant, but in general they had a very good adoption of these kinds of technologies. And in this phenomenon we have seen doctors starting to use these tools and they have a great advantage over advanced doctors or centers. That not use the technology because we have more precise reports for the patients in a shorter time in the centers that use this kind of technology. >> Terrific. Now let's switch gears and talk about Nubiral. It provided the cloud infrastructure for a smart diagnostic solution on AWS. Can you give us some more insight on that Fabian? >> Fabian: Basically in our project it was essential to use cloud technology of AWS because of it's implementation of the services. You can very quickly provide services to new clinics new healthcare facilities in a matter of times or minutes from the point where we have the need and until the client has the software. It's very quick and it's easy to do and uh and the value there is the capacity for the clinic or the health care center to have more precise times with results and with AI in the results that delivers to the patient. >> Natalie: Terrific. Now let's talk about Entelai now. It decided to make its solidarity contribution to the COVID-19 pandemic, adapting its AI algorithms for chest radiography. Please give us some more insight on that project, Mauricio >> Mauricio: As we said at the beginning chest x-rays is one of the mostly used uh since studies that we people usually do when it's something that we've been doing for a while. So in the context of the pandemic we decided to retrain by the algorithm taking advantage of that knowledge, it was adjusted to detect COVID-19. This pathology produces damage on the lungs and on the body and that way with DevOps and CT scans we can detect and it's cheap and available in our region. So we believe this could be a could provide a significant uh approach especially in areas, where we didn't have specialists. So we saw that making it available on the, on the web, on the cloud everybody could upload an image and have a recommendation with a trained system, with the equivalent of what would be a specialist. So we believe it was an interesting contribution, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, but we expect to have help patients to receive hourly attention, hourly care >> And shifting gears. Now, a bit I'd like to switch over to Fabian. Could you give us some insight on your business model? >> Yes, Nubiral is the company working hand in hand with AWS We provide professional services to all the companies and clients willing to transform to go for a digital transformation. We accompanied them in this transformation with concrete tools thanks to the solutions and tools that AWS provides. So we can model any case that we use and we can convert it to a digital case and escalate it in a matter of weeks or days this is the power of any business, the agility and quickness with which we can implement a solution. >> Natalie: And I'd like to switch it over now to our other guests. Would you kindly give us some insight now Mauricio on your business model? >> Yeah. We also work in partnership with Nubiral and AWS to generate a model that is cost effective and that is scalable for healthcare facilities. And we usually were the study bubbles we aim at centers that as they need these studies, they can have them available and they can conceive them Just as if it were a micro service of AWS And in this way, we can use the cloud with sources in a very smart way, with very good results for the patient. >> Natalie: And staying with you. Mauricio, just in a few words, give us some understanding of the kind of customer impact that you're seeing. >> Yeah, well, the Entelai focus that we are working on, on the cloud is to change the life of the patients as a company funded by doctors, specialists and computing, our focus are the patient and we change patient lives for the impact that we have in medical practice and the imaging specialists and imaging centers. So we have different new cases of how this technology is changing the lives of the patients. Either for early detection of important diseases like breast cancer or neurodegenerative diseases in the brain, which are sort of are main algorithms we are working with or where they are here in emergencies with chest x-rays the centers that use these algorithms can optimize what patients need to wait in the ER or if they can go home. And it's our traditional cases that where Entelai with AI is helping patients. >> Natalie: And now Fabian, I'd love it for you to weigh in as well. Talk about the impact that you're seeing >> Today. Clients choose those because of the customization that the solution that we've developed, one of the most valuable things of the world we live in is to adjust the client needs because every business is different where is not only one size fits all. With the tools, the a partner like AWS we can send the right solutions that are customized with a big impact and with added value to the client. >> Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me and offering these incredible insights and the impact that your companies are making for people all around the world. That's it for this segment of the AWS global public sector partner awards I'm your host Natalie Erlich. Thanks very much for watching. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm delighted to present our special guests for today's program and they are Kyle Hines, VP Strategic Accounts at Presidio as well as chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr., chief of the Cherokee Nation. Welcome to the program, gentlemen >> Thank you. >> Terrific, well, delighted to have you here, we're going to discuss the key award of best partner transformation, most impactful nonprofit partner, of course now highlighting some of the technologies now being technology now being leveraged to help preserve the Cherokee language as well as its culture. Now, Chuck, I'd like to start with you and if you could describe some of the challenges that the Cherokee nation is now faced with in terms of preserving the language and its culture and how you see technology being able to really help preserve it. >> Well, thank you, Natalie. It was really good to be with you all today. The Cherokee language and culture is what makes us unique as a people. It's the link that links us back to time and immemorial through generations. And over those generations, there've been many threats to our language and culture. There's been disease after European contact, there's been dispossession, there's been our forced removal on the trail of tears. Other pressures in more modern times have continued to erode our language and culture, including, boarding schools, the public school system through most of the 20th century as Cherokee Nation has gotten back on its feet, that is to say when the govern the United States has allowed Cherokee Nation to do what we've always done well which is to govern ourselves, chart our own destiny, and preserve our life ways, we've been able to make preservation efforts but those generations of eroding our language and culture had coming to steep costs. We're the largest tribe in the country, 392,000 citizens and by the way we're mostly in Northeast, Oklahoma but we have Cherokees living all over the country even all over the world. And we only have 2000 fluent speakers left. So it's a great challenge to save a language that's truly endangered. And if we don't save it generations from now we may do a number of things exceedingly well as we do today, business, providing education and housing, creating a great healthcare system, but we will have lost that thing that makes us a unique people, that thing that links us back to our past. And so what we're doing today, working with great partners like Presidio is just indispensable to what's really our most important mission. >> Yeah, terrific. Well, thank you so much for those insights. I'd like to switch it over to Kyle and hear about the technologies now being utilized to preserve the Cherokee language and culture. >> Sure, happy to Natalie and thanks for having us this morning. So yeah, when we started to work with the Cherokee Nation, it was very clear to us that, there's obviously a higher power or a higher mission here. And so it's really been an honor to work with the chief and the nation and what we've been able to do is is take what the Cherokee Nation is trying to do in terms of language and cultural preservation and build solutions in really a very modern way. So between Inage’i, the 3D mobile open-world game and the virtual classroom platform, it's entirely a cloud native serverless solution in AWS, using a lot of the most modern tools and technologies in the marketplace. For example, in the mobile game, it's built around unity and the virtual classroom platform is built around the Amazon chime SDK, which allows us to really build something that is very clean and light and focused on what the nation is trying to achieve and really cut out a lot of the baggage and the other sort of plumbing and various other technologies that this would have, this type of solution would have taken just a few short years ago. >> Yeah, terrific. Well, Kyle, staying with you, what do you think were some of the factors behind the development of this solution? >> Yeah, so I think flexibility was key. Was maybe the biggest design goal in building these solutions because you learn a lot when you originally set out to build something and it starts to impact real users, and in this case, speakers of the Cherokee Nation, you learn a tremendous amount about the language and how it's used and how people communicate with each other. And so the main design goal of the solutions was to allow a sort of flexibility that lets us adapt. And every time we learn something and every time we find something that works or perhaps doesn't work quite as well as was imagined, we have the flexibility to change that and kind of stay nimble and on our toes. >> Terrific, well, Chuck, now switching over to you, why do you think that some of these, platforms like the virtual classroom are so effective with Cherokee speakers? >> Well, a couple of reasons, one pandemic related, during COVID the worst public health crisis the world seen in living memory, we have had to adapt quickly to continue on our mission to save this language. We couldn't afford a year off in terms of pairing speakers, by the way, most of our fluent speakers are over the age of 70, with young people who need to learn the language and be the new generation of speakers. So it's been really important that during those difficult times we could connect virtually and the technology we've been using has worked so effectively, but the other is really irrespective of what's going on in terms of having to isolate, and social distance and things of that nature during COVID, and that is just making sure we can make this language accessible, particularly to young people in a manner in which they are becoming accustomed to learning things throughout the rest of the world. And so using platforms that they're familiar with is very important but it also has to be something that an older generation of these fluent speakers, as I say most of them are over 70, can use. And that's what really has been so effective about this platform. It's so usable. Once you introduce it to people whether it's a young person who can adapt pretty quickly 'cause they're growing up immersed in it, or it's someone who has not been familiar with that technology, with just a little bit of showing them how to use it, suddenly this classroom becomes just like you're in person. And that makes all the difference in the world in terms of connecting these young people with their elders. As the other thing is Cherokees are by nature very much part of a big extended family. And so that personal connection that you can maintain through this platform is really important. I think it's going to be the key to how we save this language, because as I say we have Cherokees all over the country, even all over the world and we're going to harness our numbers, the large population we have and find those with the interest and aptitude to learn the language, we must use this technology and so far it's worked well. >> Yeah, terrific, and now switching over to Kyle, we'd love to hear from you how your team developed this technology. How they really thought out, what kinds of methods are really going to drive the interaction and the immersion and engagement among these disparate demographics of, elderly Cherokees and also the young generation. So, how did your team go about developing that? >> Yeah, it's a very good question because in a situation like this, there is no shortage of different ways that you could have built a solution like this. There are a lot of different ways that it could have been done. So the tax that we took was a rigorous focus on the user experience and on the experience of the speaker. And that allowed us to detach ourselves to a large degree from what were the exact technology choices that were implemented in terms of AWS services, other open source packages that run on AWS, it's being able to focus completely on what the nation was trying to achieve with their speakers, both through the game and the virtual classroom platform. It let us take a lot of other design decisions and technology choices sort of into the background and behind a level of abstraction. And so there's always quite a bit of rigorous testing and really making sure you understand how something's going to perform in the wild, but the reality of the situation was, the whole reason for doing it was the experience of the speakers, both in the game and in the classroom platform. So we stayed very focused on that and made technology decisions sort of second fiddle or lower priority. >> Terrific, well, Chuck, how do you think that these kinds of innovations could be applied to other areas of the Cherokee school system? >> Well, our greatest challenge is preserving language and culture, but we also have as part of our mission to educate this new generation of Cherokees coming up. For years and years, really generations, Cherokees who were able to get a good education many of them left our tribal lands for new opportunities. And so we lost a great deal because of the economic pressures here in Northeast, Oklahoma, particularly on our Cherokee lands. So the task now is to generate opportunity for a new generation coming up. Education is key to that and so if we want to create a pipeline of young Cherokees who want to get into the healthcare fields, want to get into aerospace, want to get into other professions, we've got to create an education system that is steadier and modern. We have a school that is K through 12th grade, K through the senior year, and so we have an opportunity really to do that. And I think for the first time in our history, in this era, I'm talking elect the last few decades, we are able to really craft education in a way that works for us and using technology and making choices about what that technology is, is important to us. It's a bygone era in which the federal government or the state is sort of imposing on us what choices we make. Now we can reach out with great partners all over the world like Presidio and say what solution can work for our classroom? When we can identify what the great demands are on the reservation in terms of jobs. And one of the great demands we have is healthcare. So how can we use technology to inspire little Cherokee boys and girls to grow up and be doctors and nurses here in just a few decades when we're building this great health system? Well, we're going to use technology to do it. So the possibilities are really unlimited and they need to be because we think our potential here in Cherokee Nation is unlimited. >> Yeah, I mean that's terrific to hear how technology is really encouraging younger generations to study, learn and really push themselves further. Kyle, I'd like to switch over to you and hear a little bit about the benefits of launching this kind of platform on AWS. >> Yeah, there are a lot of benefits to building this on AWS. And I think that it spans a couple of categories, even. I mean, from a technological perspective there was every tool and every service that we needed to build both of the solutions that we built right there in AWS. And when there was a, when there was a time where we needed to jump out and use a project outside of AWS, running on AWS such as the unity engine, AWS makes that very easy. So I would say that the choice was easy because there are technological realities and the breadth and the depth of the technological portfolio in AWS combined with the partnership that we get from them, It's really, you know, there's a lot of support when it comes to, Hey we're working with the Cherokee nation on something that's extremely important. We need your help. We need you to help us figure this out. It's never been hard to get that partnership. >> Terrific, and also following up on that, love to hear how AWS really helped with flexibility and also the cost effective effectiveness of this kind of platform. >> Yeah I would take those questions backwards or in reverse order because the cost-effectiveness of the solution is really, it's really something to make note of because when we build something in the way that we built these platforms they're serverless and event driven. Meaning that the Cherokee Nation is not paying for a solution constantly as we would in lives past running things in data centers and such. It really, the services in AWS allow us to say, Hey, let's spin up certain pieces of functionality when they're needed as they're being used. And the meter is running during that time, and the cost is occurred during the time it's being used and not all of the time. So that really has a dramatic impact on cost effectiveness. And then from a flexibility standpoint, as we learn new things, as we evolve the platform as we grow this out to more and more speakers and to more and more impact to the Cherokee Nation, we have all kinds of different technology choices that we can make and it's all contained within AWS. >> Yeah, and I'd like to open this now to both of you, starting with Chuck, how do you think this kind of technology could be applied to other cultures or languages that re seeking to preserve themselves? There's so many languages in the world that are now dying out because most of us are only speaking, just a few like English, Spanish, just a few others, what steps can be taken so that humanity can preserve these important languages? >> Well, you're right. There are so many endangered languages around the world and indigenous languages are unfortunately dying all over the world all the time, even as we speak, they're slipping away. The United nations is dedicated the next decade to the preservation of indigenous languages. That's gotten many leaders around the world thinking about how we can save languages here in this era. And I would encourage any tribal leader in particular in the United States, but I think it certainly applies around the world to seek out this technology. I mean, Cherokee Nation's in a position now where we can seek out the best in the world in terms of partnerships. And we've found that in Presidio. And of course they're using AWS which means they're using the best in the world and so the technology exists, and the willingness to work together exist. And I think generations ago that would have been not something we could have connected well on in terms of partnering with companies that were doing cutting edge things. So if you're looking to connect generations in terms of learning and sharing the language, which is just I cannot stress enough how indispensable that is to language preservation, this type of technology will do it. There are some, I think that may think, and I don't have a technology background, that if you're using this cutting edge technology, I mean this is the best in the world that you're going to speak only to this young generation coming up, and maybe it's inaccessible to an older generation. It's just not the case. This is so user-friendly that we we've been able to connect elders with young people. And if anyone in the world interested in preserving languages could see this in action, could see a young person sitting next to an elder talking about the technology or connecting virtually, it would change their whole perspective on what technology means for language reservations because I promise you all over the world the great challenges you have this group of older generations of people who know the language. They have it in their hearts, they have it in their minds and they're slipping away just from the passage of time. Connecting them with the generation coming up is just what we need to do. This technology allows us to do it. >> Yeah, Chuck following up on that when I hear about elderly people being able to connect with the younger generations in this way and share their history and their culture I'm sure that also, It must have a positive mental effect for them. Right, so elderly are often isolated. Do you have any insight on that? Any quality of insight what you've heard from people using this? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think the last year has proven how valuable it is. I mean, we lost over 50 fluent Cherokee speakers and I mentioned earlier in the program, that we only have 2000 left. 50 to COVID and more to just the passage of time and old age. But we have many that are active and engaged in language preservation and they have said to me how valuable it's been to be able to be at home and yet still feel like they're part of this great mission that we have at the Cherokee Nation. Understand that this mission that we have is on par with what any nation in history has set as a goal to shoot for whether it's the United States wanting to land a man on the moon, we're trying to save the language. This is that level of importance. And so for an elder to feel like they're connected and still contributing during this past year difficult times, that makes all the difference in the world. And even as I say, as the pandemic recedes and we hope it continues to recede, there is still a need for elders to stay connected. And in many cases they cannot due to poor health, due to the lack of transportation, this knocks down those barriers and so there's a great deal of joy that has been gained from using this technology. And honestly, just talking to elders about young people getting the opportunity to play this video game even some elders that were voice actors in this game, that Presidio helped us develop. I mean, I can't tell you how important that is for somebody to use their language, to make a living. And that's part of how you preserve a language. Presidio has showed us a way that we can do just that. So we're not only training new speakers, we're giving this opportunity many cases to elders to do something that is very productive with the wonderful gift they have, which is the Cherokee language. >> Terrific, well that is really inspiring because potentially this technology could be utilized by generations to come. The current young people that are using this will one day be the elderly. So, Kyle, how do you see this technology potentially on this platform being evolved? What's the next step to keep it really up to date for future generations as it's evolving. >> Yeah, there's a lot of plans on where to take this I can tell you, honestly. From the perspective of the mobile game, you're building on a platform of an open world game means that the imagination is the limit quite honestly. So there are a lot of new characters and new levels and new adventures that are plans to further immerse the speakers in the platform. And I think that will, that will help with reach and it will help with the amount of connection that's built to the chief's point about bridging the older generations into the younger generations over that common bond of the language and the culture that keeps those connections alive. And so we want to expand the mobile game Engage, the navigate to be as accessible and as wide reaching and immersive as it possibly can, and there are a lot of plans in the works for that. And then with the virtual classroom platform, we started with a various focused constituency within the nation of the language immersion school. And there are many other educational services and even healthcare to the chief's earlier point again where I think there's a lot of potential for that one as well. >> All right, well, terrific gentlemen. Thank you so much for your insights, really fantastic hearing how this platform is really a difference in the lives of people in the Cherokee Nation. Of course, that were our guests, Kyle Hines, VP Strategic Accounts at Presidio as well as chief Chuck Hoskin Jr., the chief of the Cherokee Nation. And that's all for today's session at the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards, I'm your host for "theCUBE", Natalie Erlich. Thanks so much for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards for this very important event, the award for best partner transformation, best energy solution. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich for theCUBE and I'm very pleased to welcome our next guests. They are Alan Henson, Senior Principal at Pariveda Solutions and Doug Priedeman, Project Engineering Manager at ExxonMobil Global Projects. Welcome to the program, so glad to have you here. >> Glad to be here. Thank you. >> Yes, thanks for having us. >> Terrific. Well, let's start with you, Doug. Can you give us a brief overview of your subsidiary for some of our audience that may not be familiar with it? And also how are you using AWS now to transform collaboration on major capital projects? >> Certainly and thank you. So as many will know ExxonMobil as a sort of a global energy provider around the world operating on six out of the seven continents. Global Projects, which is the specific subsidiary where I work, we are responsible for delivery of major capital projects to the various business units around the world. So we have the opportunity to, once approved by the business unit, to deliver on the engineering, procurement, and construction activities associated with building a new facility, if you will. And that ranges across oil and gas production, refining and chemical activities. >> Terrific. And I'd love to shift now to Alan. Could you give us an insight on DPH and your collaboration with ExxonMobil? That would be terrific. >> Happy too. We first got involved with Digital Project Home after Doug had reached out to AWS seeking ways to innovate how major capital projects look at collaboration in the engineering, procurement, and construction value chain. And we were brought in as an AWS Premier Partner to help design an uplift, a new way to facilitate that collaboration between ExxonMobil and its EPC companies. And we got involved early on in the design phase where we were in the room together putting up wire frames on the walls, walking through the processes, trying to figure out how do we streamline the process that had quite a bit of toil in it from both the combination of mixed systems to manual processes. And that's where we got involved and really helped to sketch out some of that early vision from Doug. >> Terrific. Now, Doug, how is Digital Project Home facilitating collaboration with your contractors? >> Well, as folks would recognize, some of these projects are quite large, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars, very extensive in terms of the number of people on the owner-operator side as well as the various professional contracting firms that help us to succeed at building out these projects and the decisions, the interactions, the way that we work with one another involves hundreds of millions of hours in some cases, and many, many decisions. What we were looking for is to try to understand how some of those formal interactions, where questions are asked and answered and we need a record of the question that was asked and answered for contractual purposes and for the history, when documents are submitted and need to be reviewed and returned. Some of those formal interactions, historically, had been through platforms and methodologies that were really quite, to use the phrase Alan just did, quite toilsome. And what we were looking to do was to kind of come in to the modern world and use some of the digital tools, methods and programming that are available to help automate in some cases, to help smooth the actual transfer of information, and to bring information to the surface. As practitioners on a project, how do you have information available to you at your fingertips so that you can have better information that allows you to make better decisions and return your answers, not only more quickly with less hours involved in getting to that answer, but also a better answer with a higher confidence that we've answered it the way we need to, we don't have to revisit later. >> Terrific. Well, Alan can you now describe some of the benefits of this cloud native serverless architecture? >> Absolutely. If you remember back what Doug was saying earlier, ExxonMobil operates on six to seven continents around the world. So one of the first things we wanted to do is make sure that we were designing for a solution that could meet any end-user, no matter where they were in the world, whether it was Africa, North America, Australia, Asia, it didn't matter. So we wanted to choose a cloud infrastructure like AWS that had an amazing ability to serve global customers around the world. And more specifically, we knew it was really important to get to a value adding solution as quickly as possible. So by leveraging serverless technology, we got to spend most of our time building the technology that was going to be adding value because AWS infrastructure had already solved many of just the pipe work style issues at hand. So AWS really gave us an accelerated platform to really start diving in to the innovative side of improving collaboration between ExxonMobil and their engineering, procurement and construction vendors. >> Terrific. Now staying with you, Alan. I'd love to hear how is that helping ExxonMobil to build with greater agility and at lower costs? >> There are a couple of things that come to mind with me. First, we led very early on with a modular based design. We knew there were going to be multiple use cases that we had to satisfy and every major capital project does follow rigorous global processes, but often has to adapt them to the environment at hand to what they're particularly constructing, things of that nature. So we wanted to build a solution that would adapt them quickly, so they're not constantly having to go back and build new customizations, new workflows that were specific to one entity or project versus another. So just by making it modular and flexible, we were able to already start to save costs. Additionally, because we're moving into the cloud, we completely take out a lot of the infrastructure maintenance costs that go with that. And that's really where the AWS infrastructure and the cloud based solution really started to help save money as we streamlined this solution. >> Yeah. Well, speaking of flexibility, Doug, why is it so important for your business? >> So, as Alan pointed out, Natalie, we work all over the world with different partners, different EPC contractors, and so we needed the flexibility to be able to use this tool in locations, all around the world. In many cases, the same project has people located around the world. So we had to have that speed and access. We also had to have the flexibility to be able to adjust to specific requirements perhaps of unique relationships between us, our co-venture partners, the countries that host us and so forth. But in addition to that, I'll add to Alan's comment, by structuring it the way Pariveda did, what we ended up with is sort of foundational building blocks that allowed us then to extend in future to additional interactions that we might have with our contractors. So we built out the first couple, and those are available to us today, technical queries and document reviews, but we knew and anticipate that we will continue to have additional workflows, if you will, additional interactions with our partners that we will want to automate and strengthen in the same way. And so having the flexibility of this building block architecture that Pariveda put together allows us to anticipate that in future we can build that out to additional workflows. >> Terrific. Well, now shifting gears. I'd love to hear from Alan a bit here, or actually Doug, excuse me. How do you actually find the system? Do you find that it is intuitive, or do you have to train people really meticulously on this kind of platform? >> Well, design from the beginning to be a very user-friendly. The user experience element of the design work, Pariveda brought that in from the very beginning. And in fact, from our perspective, was one of the key talents that they brought to the design. So we had a problem that we were trying to solve, a platform that we wanted it to work on, but that user interaction, that user experience was so important from the very beginning and is quite frankly, an area where I lacked the experience to have been able to influence it very much, but the Pariveda team and the AWS team as they work together with us built in user experience from the very beginning. That doesn't mean that we don't have to still give some folks a little bit of training to get used to it, but it was designed from the beginning to be quite an intuitive approach, so folks could do their work. We really were after, from my view, from the very beginning, low in toil, rich in information, those were the two things we were trying to accomplish with the entire platform. >> Yeah. And if either one of you want to jump in here. Obviously, you're dealing with a lot of information, what is the data storage like? >> It's surprising not as much as you might think. We designed for optimized data storage from the beginning. We really wanted to make sure we only stored the data that we needed, but also capture as much of it as possible so that we could surface information. That was a goal for us in the beginning, was to not only capture the information that was happening between the collaboration, but design it in a way that we could use technologies like AI and machine learning languages capabilities to surface data out. So from a data storage standpoint, a lot of the data was stored outside of AWS, but we also have a fair amount stored inside of AWS. And because of that footprint, we were able to keep costs quite low. >> Terrific. Well, Alan, again, staying with you, really curious. How is this system addressing the pain points of ExxonMobil global projects specifically? >> One of the main goals from the beginning, like Doug was saying, is to reduce the toil. And a lot of the toil came from the process of an EPC company needing to submit a document over to ExxonMobil and then getting it distributed to the right teams to provide that feedback, or perhaps in reverse, where ExxonMobil needed to send a document over to another EPC companies to get feedback as well. That oftentimes involve multiple people on both sides of that equation. It involved multiple systems that had to be accessed and leveraged to not only capture and trance to document, provide tools for doing markup and providing comments. Digital Project Home unified that entire experience so that the engineers on both sides of the document collaboration process could go into one system and perform all their functions. We automated the routing. We gave them an in tool PDF markup capabilities. So they could just load the document straight into their browser, start doing their work, add their comments, save and submit, and the system would facilitate all of that. So we took out multiple hops in the process and reduce the amount of time people had to spend doing tasks that weren't necessarily a value add. >> And I'll add to that. Natalie, is it okay I'll add to that? >> Oh, please do. >> Both on the EPC contractor side as well as the owner side, we have small teams of what we call document controllers 'cause we handle so many documents. But it's quite a labor intensive or manual type approach, but it didn't need to be. And the DPH approach and the way that it was built out, it's still not completely eliminated all of the intervention of document controllers, but it reduces the burden and even the team size necessary to maneuver those documents back and forth. We in our engagements with our contractors have a contractual obligation to return our comments within a specified period of time. And we were losing 10 to 20% of that time just in the document management side of getting it from the right person to the right person and back. And so when schedules are tight, we have a lot to do, losing 20% of our contractual time to get a document returned with comments, that was a bit painful for us. So eliminating that, or at least drastically reducing it was a big win among others. >> Well, staying with you, Doug, what do you see as the major benefits of creating this platform on AWS? >> Really, to me, it comes down to better decisions. In underpinned by better information at hand to those who are or having to review, answer questions, review documents that are information at hand that allows us then to have the information that's required to get to a good answer and provide that back, whether it's from the contractor to us or the other way around. On either side, surfacing information, because otherwise a practitioner is going off to find an industry standard, going back to find out if we already had a query on that same document, see what we said last time or how that question was different from this question. There was a lot of hunting and pecking, so to speak to find out what information was allied to the question or allied to the document. And what we were really looking for was a solution that would bring that information up, give us live links, allow us to jump across to that information straight away. Not only have the information, but also be able to access it quite quickly. >> Terrific. And Alan, now shifting gears over to you. I'm really curious how this system will improve efficiencies for MCPs for the years to come. >> As Doug mentioned, we designed the system from the beginning to be extendable, to be modular, to think of like Lego blocks, where the Legos themselves represent functionality that we know can serve purposes in multiple different workflows. So as ExxonMobil continues to develop this platform in partnership with feedback from their engineering, procurement, and construction companies, they're going to be able to quickly build new workflows leveraging component based design that we did from day one. So the efficiency is going to come as they or able to add new capabilities to the platform very quickly and using modern technology to ensure that it's relevant and capable and serving the businesses needs. >> Terrific. Now, Doug, as this project scales up, what are some of the other benefits would you expect can be realized? >> Well, Natalie, we're looking to extend it to more projects as is often the case with things like this. We trial it in a few places to get, to build it out, gain the experience. We're looking to extend it to additional users, but we're also looking to do, just what Allan was just mentioning there, folks involved in major projects are familiar with such things as management of change, deviations, issues management. So there are a handful of interactions that happen between between parties and something like this. And so while we've built out two of the workflows as a starting place, and while we've deployed this tool, if you will to a few of our projects, our vision is that we would be able to extend the number of users and be able to build out additional important interactions or workflows that we have so that the Digital Project Home becomes a place that holds even more of a practitioners daily work activities. >> Terrific. And if either one of you would like to jump in here and provide just like a quick snapshot of how much manpower, time, and costs are saved as a result of using this type of platform. >> Well, on our side, Alan, I'll jump in here. We anticipate on a large project, we will transact over thousands of documents. Now, some of them get more review and some of them get less review, but there are thousands of documents that are developed in terms of engineering, procurement, and construction type activities. And to the extent that we can save a small amount of time and get better answers on each one, that really adds up quickly when you consider the number of hours expended in that overall effort. So we're talking thousands upon thousands of hours that we believe can be reduced and what that translates to, not only the ability to execute a project with a smaller team, but we are confident with better information in hand, we'll make better decisions. >> Well, thank you both for your insights. Loved having you on this program. That was Alan Henson, Senior Principal at Pariveda Solutions and Doug Priedeman, Project Engineering Manager at ExxonMobil Global Projects. That's all for this session for the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards, and I'm your host Natalie Erlich for theCUBE. Thanks so much for watching. (bright music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBES studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hello and welcome to the 2021 AWS global public sector partner awards. I'm your host Natalie Erlich. Today we're going to highlight the most valuable valuable Amazon connect appointment. And we are now joined by Steve Careful, adult social care expert PA consulting group and Graham Allen, the director of adults health and care at Hampshire county council. Welcome gentlemen to today's session. >> Thank you Natalie >> I love you Natalie. >> Well by now we are really familiar the call to shelter in place and how it especially affected the most vulnerable of people. Give us some experience or some insight on your experience with that, especially in light of some of the technology that was deployed. Let's start with you, Graham. >> Yeah, Thank you. So just by way of context, Hampshire county council is one of the largest areas of local government in England. So we have a population of 1.4 million people. And when a lockdown was imposed by the national government of England in the 23rd of March 2020. Shortly thereafter the evidence in terms of vulnerabilities around COVID-19 strongly identified that people with a range of clinical conditions were most vulnerable and needed to shield and self issolate. And for the size of our population, we quickly were advised that roughly some 30,000 people in the initial carts because of political vulnerabilities needed to sheild and receive a variety of support shortly after that through the summer of 2020 that number increased some 50,000. And then by January of this year that number further increased based on the scientific and medical evidence to 83,000 people in total. So that represented a huge challenge for us in terms of offering support, being able to make sure that not only practical tasks related to obtaining shopping food and so on and so forth, but also medications but also the real risks of self isolation. Many of the people that we were needing to support when here the two known to us as a social care provider. They were being advised through clinical medical evidence needs and many of those people lived alone. So the real risk of self isolation not seeing anyone potentially for an extended period of time and the risks of their wellbeing was something very significant to us. So we needed very rapidly to develop a solution in terms of making contact, being able to offer that support. >> Yeah and I'd love it now to get your take Steve on how PA consulting group helped deliver on that call on that need. >> True so we have an existing relationship with Graham and the council, we've been working together for number of years, delivering care technology solutions to service users around the county. We were obviously aware there was a major issue as COVID and lockdown began. So we sat down with Graham and his colleagues to ask what we could do to help. We used our relationship with AWS and our knowledge of the connect platform to suggest a mechanism for making outbound calls really at scale. And that was the beginning of the process. We were very quickly in a position where we were able to actually get that service running live. In fact, we had a working prototype within four days and a live service in seven days. And from that point on of those many thousands of people that Graham's alluded to, we were calling up to two and a half thousand a day to ask them did they need any help? Were they okay? If they did need help, If they responded yes, to those, to that question we were then able to put them through to a conventional call handler in our call center where a conversation could take place about what their needs were. And as Graham said, in many cases that was people who couldn't get out to get food shopping, people who were running short of clinical medical supplies, people who needed actually some interesting things pet care came up quite often people who couldn't leave the house home and look after their dog, they just needed some help locally. So we had to integrate with local voluntary services to get those those kinds of results and support delivered to them across the whole of Hampshire and ultimately throughout the whole of the COVID experience. So coming right up until March of this year. >> Right well, as the COVID pandemic progressed and, you know evolved in different stages, you know, with variants and a variety of different issues that came up over the last year or so, you know how did the technology develop how did the relationship develop and, you know tell us about that process that you had with each other. >> So the base service remained very consistent that different points in the year, when there were different issues that may be needed to be communicated to to the service users we were calling we would change and update the script. We would improve the logistics of the service make it simpler for colleagues in the council to get the data into the system, to make the calls. And basically we did that through a constant series of meetings checkpoint, staying in touch and really treating this as a very collaborative exercise. So I don't think for all of us COVID was a constant stream of surprises. Nobody could really predict what was going to happen in a week or a month. So we just have to all stay on our toes keep in touch and be flexible. And I think that's where our preferred way of working and that of AWS and the Hampshire team we were working with we really were able to do something that was special and I'm very fleet of foot and responsive to needs. >> Right and I'd also love to get Graham's insight on this as well. What of results have you seen, you know do you have any statistics on the impact that it made on people? Did you receive any qualitative feedback from the people that use the service? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. We did. And one of the things we were very conscious of from day one was using a system which may have been unfamiliar to people when the first instance in terms of receiving calls, the fact that we were able to use human voice within the call technology, I think really, really assisted. We also did a huge amount of work within a Hampshire county council. Clearly in terms of the work we do day in, day out we're well-known to our local population. We have a huge range of different responsibilities ranging from maintenance of the roads through to the provision of local services, like libraries and so on and so forth, and also social care support. So we were able to use all of that to cover last. And Steve has said through working very collaboratively together with a trusted brand Hampshire county council working with new technology. And the feedback that we received was both very much data-driven in real time, in terms of successful calls and also those going through to call handlers and then the outcomes being delivered through those call handlers to live services out and about around the county but also that qualitative impact that we had. So across Hampshire county council we have some 76 elected members believe me they were very active. They were very interested in the work that we were doing in supporting our most vulnerable residents. And they were receiving literally dozens of phone calls as a thank you by way of congratulating. But as I say, thanking us and our partners PA at district council partners and also the voluntary community sector in terms of the very real support that was being offered to residents. So we had a very fully resolved picture of precisely what was happening literally minute by minute on a live dashboard. In terms of outgoing calls calls going through the call handlers and then successful call completion in terms of the outcomes that were being delivered on the ground around the County of Hampshire. So a phenomenally successful approach well appreciated and well, I think applauded by all those receiving calls. >> Terrific insight. Well, Steve, I'd love to hear from you more about the technology and how you put the focus on the patient on the person really made it more people focused and you know, obviously that's so critical in such a time of need. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right, Natalie. We, I think what we were able to do because I myself and my immediate team have worked with Hampshire and other local authorities on the social care side for so long. We understood the need to be very person focused. I think sometimes with technology, it comes in with it with a particular way of operating that isn't necessarily sensitive to the audience. And we knew we had to get this right from day one. So Graham's already mentioned the use of human voice invoicing the bulk call. that was very, very important. We selected a voice actress who had a very reassuring clear tone recognizing that many of the individuals we were calling would have been would have been older people maybe a little hard of hearing. We needed to have the volume in the call simple things like this were very important. One of the of the debates I remember having very early on was the choice as to whether the response that somebody would give to the question, do you need this? Or that could be by pressing a digital on the phone. We understood that again, because potentially of frailty maybe a little lack of dexterity amongst some of the people we'd be calling that might be a bit awkward for them to take the phone away from their face and find the button and press the button in time. So we pursued the idea of an oral response. So if you want this say, yes if you don't want it to say no and those kinds of small choices around how the technology was deployed I think made a really big difference in terms of of acceptance and adoption and success in the way the service run. >> Terrific. Well Graham I'd like to shift it to you. Could you give us some insight on the lessons that you learned as a result of this pandemic and also trying to move quickly to help people in your community? >> Yeah, I think the lessons in some of the lessons that we've, again learned through our response to the pandemic, are lessons that to a degree have traveled with us over a number of years in terms of the way that we've used technology over a period, working with PA, which is be outcome focused. It's sometimes very easy to get caught up in a brilliant new piece of technology. But as Steve has just said, if it's not meeting the need if we're not thinking about that human perspective and thinking about the humanity and the outcomes that we're seeking to deliver then to some degree it's going to fail And this might certainly did not fail in any way shape or form because of the thoughtfulness that was brought forward. I think what we learned from it is how we can apply that as we go forward to the kinds of work that we do. So, as I've already said we've got a large population, 1.4 million people. We are moving from some really quite traditional ways of responding to that population, accelerated through our response to COVID through using AI technologies. Thinking about how we embed that more generally would a service offer not only in terms of supporting people with social care needs but that interface between ourselves and colleagues within the health sector, the NHS to make sure that we're thinking about outcomes and becoming much more intuitive in terms of how we can engage with our population. It's also, I think about thinking across wider sectors in terms of meeting people's needs. One of the, I think probably unrealized things pre COVID was the using virtual platforms of various kinds of actually increased engagement with people. We always thought in very traditional ways in order to properly support our population we must go out and meet them face to face. What COVID has taught us is actually for many people the virtual world connecting online, having a variety of different technologies made available to support them in their daily living is something that they've absolutely welcomed and actually feel much safer through being able to do the access is much more instant. You're not waiting for somebody to call. You're able to engage with a trusted partner, you know face-to-face over a virtual platform and get an answer more or less then and there. So I think there's a whole range of opportunities that we've learned, some of which we're already embedding into our usual practice. If I can describe anything over the last 15 months as usual but we're taking it forward and we hope to expand upon that at scale and at pace. >> Yeah, that's a really excellent point about the rise of hybrid care, both in the virtual and physical world. What can we expect to see now, moving forward like to shift over to our other guests, you know, what do you see next for technology as a result of the pandemic? >> Well, there's certainly been an uptake in the extent to which people are comfortable using these technologies. And again, if you think about the kind of target group that Graham and his colleagues in the social care world are dealing with these are often older people people with perhaps mobility issues, people with access issues when it comes to getting into their GP or getting into hospital services. The ability for those services to go out to them and interact with them in a much more immediate way in a way that isn't as intrusive. It isn't as time consuming. It doesn't involve leaving the house and finding a ways on public transport to get to see a person who you're going to see for five minutes in a unfamiliar building. I think that that in a sense COVID has accelerated the acceptance that that's actually pretty good for some people. It won't suit everybody and it doesn't work in every context, but I think where it's really worked well and works is a great example of that. Is in triaging and prioritizing. Ultimately the kinds of resources Graham's talked about the people need to access the GPs and the nurses and the care professionals are in short supply. Demand will outstrip will outstrip supply. therefore being able to triage and prioritize in that first interaction, using a technology ruse enables you to ensure you're focusing your efforts on those who've got the most urgent or the greatest need. So it's a kind of win all around. I think there's definitely been a sea change and it's hard to see hard to see people going back just as the debate about, will everybody eventually go back to offices, having spent a working at home? You know, I think the answer is invariably going to be no, some will but many won't. And it's the same with technology. Some will continue to interact through a technology channel. They won't go back to the face-to-face option that they had previously. >> Terrific. Well, thank you both very much. Steve Careful PA consulting group and Graham Allen Hampshire county council really appreciate your, your insights on how this important technology helped people who were suffering in the midst of the pandemic. Thank you. >> Steve: You're welcome. >> Graham: Thank you. >> Well, that's all for this session. Thank you so much for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from the cube studios in Palo alto >>in boston >>connecting with thought leaders all around the >>world. This >>is a cute conversation. Hello and welcome to today's session of the AWS Global Public sector Partner Awards. I'm your host Natalie ehrlich. Today we're going to focus on the following award for best partner transformation. I'm pleased to introduce our guests, josh door smith, vice president of public sector at Effectual and jeremy Yates, deputy technology architect at jenny May. Welcome gentlemen so glad to have you on our show. >>Hi there. Very nice to be here. Thank you so much for having me >>terrific. Well josh, I'd like to start with you. How can companies leverage cloud native solutions to deliver higher quality services? >>So Natalie, that's a great question. And in the public sector and our our government customers, we run into this all the time. It's kind of our bread and butter. What what they can do is the first thing they need to be aware of is you don't have to be afraid of the cloud as some very obscure technology that is just emerging. It's been out for 10, 11 years now, customers across government space are using it lock stock and barrel to do everything from just managing simple applications, simple websites all the way through hosting their entire infrastructure, both in production and for disaster recovery purposes as well. So the first thing to note is just don't be afraid of the cloud. Um secondly, it's, it's imperative that they select the right partner who is able to kind of be there Sherpa to go into however far they want to dip their toe into the, into the proverbial cloud waters. Um to select somebody who knows whatever it is that they need to go do. So if they want to go Aws as we are talking about today, pick a partner who has the right experience, past performance designations and competencies with the cloud that they're interested in. >>Terrific. Well, you know, Jeremy, I'd love to move to you. What does modern modernization mean to jenny May? >>Sure, Thanks Natalie, great to be here. Thanks josh as well, you know. So for jenny May, modernization is really, it's not just technology is holistic across the organization. So that includes things like the business, um not just you know, the the I. T. Division. So we're looking at the various things to modernize like our culture and structural changes within the organization. Um moving to implement some, some proven practices like def sec ops and continuous integration and continuous delivery or deployment. Uh and then, you know, our overall overarching goal is to give the best and most secure technology to the business that we can to meet the Jeannie Mai mission and the needs of our customers >>terrific. Well josh, how is Effectual planning to support jenny Maes modernization plans? >>So we have been supporting jenny May for about 14 months now. Uh and back in september of last year, we rewarded a co prime 10 year contract for Jeannie Mai to do exactly that. It's to provide all things cloud to Jeannie Mai for 10 years on AWS and that's including reselling AWS. That's including providing all sorts of professional services to them. And it's, it's providing some third party software applications to help them support their applications themselves. So what Effectual is doing is kind of a threefold. We are supporting the modernization of their process, which jeremy mentioned a moment ago and that includes in stan shih ating a cloud center of Excellence for jenny May, which enables them to modernize the way they do cloud governance while they're modernizing their technology stack. We're also providing a very expert team of cloud architects and Dempsey cops engineers to be able to, to design the Jeannie Mai environment, collaborating with our co prime uh to ensure that it meets the security requirements, the compliance requirements that jerry mentions. Uh, Jeannie Mai is a federal entity, but it also has to adhere to all the finance industry uh compliance requirements as well. So very strenuous from that perspective. And then the third thing that we're doing to help them kind of along their modernization journey is in stan shih aging infrastructure as code. So in the cloud, rather than building everything in the AWS management console, we script everything to build it automatically, so it improves consistency, it improves the customer experience regardless of which resource is working on it. And it improves disaster recovery capability as well. And also, just quite frankly, the speed by which they can actually deploy things. >>And jeremy, how is this transition helping your security really enhancing it now? >>Uh From a security perspective we're implementing a number of various tools um both, you know, a W. S based as well as other software that josh mentioned. Um So we're able to utilize those in a more scalable manner than we could previously in the traditional data center. Um we've got a number of things such as we're looking at multiple vulnerability management products like 10 of Ohio and Wallace. Um we're using uh tools such as Centra fi for our our pam or privileged access management capabilities. Um Splunk a pretty industry standard. Um software for log and data correlation and analysis um will also be using that for some system and application monitoring. Um as well as uh the Mcafee envision product for endpoint and other cloud service security. So being able to pull all those in in a more scalable and more cost efficient way as well from cloud based services. Uh, it's really helped us be able to get those services and integrate them together in a way that, you know, we may not previously been able to. >>Yeah, terrific. Well, josh, let's move back to you and talk further about compliance. You know, any insight here, how Effectual is building a modern cloud infrastructure to integrate AWS services with third party tools to really achieve compliance with the government requirements. Just any further insight on that >>front? That's a great question. Natalie and I'm gonna tag team with Jeremy on this one if you don't mind, but I'll start off so jenny may obviously I mentioned earlier has federal requirements and financial requirements so focused right now on on those federal aspects. Um, so the tools that Jeremy mentioned a moment ago, we are integrating all of them with a W. S native meaning all of the way we do log aggregation in the various tools within AWS cloudwatch cloud trail. All of those things were implementing an AWS native, integrating them with Splunk to aggregate all of that information. But then one of the key requirements that's coming up with the federal government in the very near future is tick three dot or trusted internet connection. Basically in the first iteration a decade or so ago, the government wanted to limit the amount of points of presence that they have with the public facing internet fast forward several versions to today and they're pushing that that onus back on the various entities like jenny May and like hud, which Jeannie Mai is a part of but they still want to have that kind of central log repository to where all of the, all of the security logs and vulnerability logs and things like that. Get shipped to a central repository and that will be part of DHS. So what effectual has done in partnership with jenny May is create a, a W. S native solution leveraging some of those third party tools that we mentioned earlier to get all of those logs aggregated in a central repository for Ginny MaE to inspect ingest and take action from. But then also provide the mechanism to send that to DHS to do that and correlate that information with everything coming in from feeds across the government. Now that's not required just yet. But we're future proofing jenny Maes infrastructure in order to be able to facilitate adherence to those requirements when it becomes uh required. Um, and so jeremy, I'll pass it over to you to talk a little bit further about that because I know that's one of the things that's near and dear to your sister's heart as well as jenny may overall. >>Yeah, absolutely. Thanks josh. Um, so yeah, we, as you mentioned, we have implemented um, uh, sort of a hybrid tech model right now, um, to to handle compliance on that front. Um, so we're still using a, you know, some services from the legacy or our existing T two dot x models. That that josh was mentioning things such as m tips, um, uh, the Einstein sensors, etcetera. But we're also implementing that take 30 architecture on our own. As josh mentioned that that will allow us to sort of future proof and and seamlessly really transitioned to once we make that decision or guidance comes out or, you know, mandates or such. Um, so that effort is good to future proof house from a compliance perspective. Um, also, you know, the tools that I mentioned, uh, josh reiterated, those are extremely important to our our security and compliance right. Being able to ensure, you know, the integrity and the confidentiality of of our systems and our data is extremely important. Not both, not just both on the r not only on the government side, but as josh mentioned, the finance side as well. >>Terrific. Well, I'd love to get your insight to on AWS workspaces. Um, if either one of you would like to jump in on this question, how did they empower the jenny May team to work remotely through this pandemic? >>That's a great question. I guess I'll start and then we'll throw it to jeremy. Um, so obviously uh effectual started working with jenny May about three weeks after the pandemic formally started. So perfect timing for any new technology initiative. But anyway, we, we started talking with Jeremy and with his leadership team about what is required to actually facilitate and enable our team as well as the government resources and the other contractors working for jenny May to be able to leverage the new cloud environment that we were building and the very obvious solution was to implement a virtual desktop infrastructure uh type solution. And obviously Jeannie Mai had gone all in on amazon web services, so it became the national natural fit to look first at AWS workspaces. Um, so we have implemented that solution. There are now hundreds of jenny May and jenny make contractor resources that have a WS workspaces functioning in the GovCloud regions today and that's a very novel approach to how to facilitate and enable not only our team who is actually configuring the infrastructure, but all the application developers, the security folks and the leadership on the jenny may side to be able to access, review, inspect, check log etcetera, through this remote capability. It's interesting to note that Jeannie Mai has been entirely remote since the pandemic initiated. Jeremy's coming to us from, from west Virginia today, I'm coming to us from national harbor Maryland And we are operating totally remotely with a team of 60 folks about supporting this specific initiative for the cloud, not to mention the hundreds that are supporting the applications that Jamie runs to do its day to day business. So jeremy, if you wouldn't mind talking about that day to day business that jenny may has and, and kind of what the, the mission statement of Jeannie Mai is and how us enabling these workspaces uh facilitates that mission >>or you know, so the part of the overall mission of jenny Maes to, to ensure affordable housing is, is made available to uh, the american public. Um that's hud and, and jenny may as part of that and we provide um mortgage backed securities to help enable that. Um, so we back a lot of V A. Loans, um, F H A, those sort of loans, um, workspaces has been great in that manner from a technology perspective, I think because as you mentioned, josh, it's really eliminated the need for on premise infrastructure, right? We can be geographically dispersed, We can be mobile, um, whether we're from the east coast or west coast, we can access our environment securely. Uh, and then we can, you know, administer and operate and maintain the technology that the business needs to, to fulfill the mission. Um, and because we're able to do that quickly and securely and effectively, that's really helpful for the business >>Terrific. And um, you know, I'd like to shift gears a bit and uh you know, discuss what you're looking ahead toward. What is your vision for 2021? How do you see this partnership evolving? >>Yeah, you >>Take that 1/1. >>Sure. Yeah. Um you know, definitely some of the things we look forward to in 2021 as we evolve here is we're going to continue our cloud journey um you know, through practices like Deb said cops, you realize that uh that journey has never done. It's always a continual improvement process. It's a loop to continually work towards um a few specific things or at least one specific thing that we're looking forward to in the future, as josh mentioned earlier was our arctic three Oh Initiative. Um, so with that we think will be future proofed. Um as there's been a lot of um a lot of recent cyber security activity and things like that, that's going to create um opportunities I think for the government and Jeannie Mai is really looking forward to to leading in that area. >>Mhm and josh, can you weigh in quickly on that? >>Absolutely. Uh First and foremost we're very much looking forward to receiving authority to operate with our production environment. We have been preparing for that for this last year plus. Uh but later on this summer we will achieve that 80 oh status. And we look forward to starting to migrate the applications into production for jenny May. And then for future proof, it's as jerry jerry mentioned, it's a journey and we're looking forward to cloud optimizing all of their applications to ensure that they're spending the right money in the right places uh and and ensuring that they're not spending over on any of the one given area. So we're very excited to optimize and then see what the technology that we're being able to provide to them will bring to them from an idea and a conceptual future for jenny may. >>Well thank you both so very much for your insights. It's been a really fantastic interview. Our guests josh duggar smith as well as jeremy Gates. Really appreciate it. >>Thank you very much. >>Thank you so much. >>Terrific. Well, I'm your host for the cube Natalie or like to stay tuned for more coverage. Thanks so much for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to today's session at the 2021, AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards, for the award for the best, Think Big for Small Business Partner. I'm your host Natalie Erlich, and we are now joined by our very special guest, Lisa Brunet, a managing Partner and President of the DLZP Group. Welcome to today's session. Now, I'd love to talk with you about how you got to partner with AWS. >> Sure, I think Natalie, thank you so much for your time today. So we started a journey with AWS back in 2012, we ran into an AWS rep at another conference, and he was talking about how he would love to do some innovative technology, because one of my reps were actually wearing gold glass, and he's like, I need something creative, I need something different. Because right now AWS, Amazon is just known for selling online books, while the cloud is only known for storing photos. So we spent a little bit of time working with them, and we came up with this idea of doing creating the test drive, where people could actually go and try a different product, like we actually did PeopleSoft on AWS. So we were able to prove that large ERP applications could run on the cloud. And that was actually faster and more resilient than having it on premise, and from there, it's been a whirlwind journey with AWS. >> Now terrific, well, how does TBSP open doors for companies and help them understand all of the tools available to them through AWS, as well as APN. >> With the Think Big for Small Business program, what it does, it gives us the opportunity to play with the big guys. So a lot of small businesses have the capabilities, they're very agile, and they have the connections, they have the capabilities. But because of our size, we have limitations on getting the number of certifications, getting the network competencies. So with this program, it evens the playing field for everybody. So now I'm able to like... I've been turned away projects because of my size, because they're like, well you're not certified by AWS at this level. But now I'm at the same level, as some of my some of the larger primes, and I'm able to compete with them head to head now. >> So has this kind of like democratizing effect. >> Yes, it does. >> Terrific. Well, to expand a bit more on how, the Think Big program has helped us overcome other kind of obstacles. >> For us, a big obstacle was always with the competencies and the certifications. So before, we would never eligible to get a competency, even though we were the ones that proved that PeopleSoft could run on the clouds. So we had the competency for Oracle Applications, we had the competency from Microsoft, but we could never, we're never eligible to actually get the competency because we were not advanced partner. And then also with the training, we were always being hindered, because we couldn't get all the discounts available at a certain level for the trading, so we had to pay full retail price. Now we get a discount, so I can send everybody for training to make sure that everybody is up to date on their certifications. >> And how do you assess your experience as an AWS partner? >> I love it, I love being an AWS partner, and that's I think what really makes the difference is the employees at AWS, they stand by us for everything. We know, of course we do give a lot of benefits to them, but anytime I have a need, I have everybody's number, I can reach out to anybody on their team and say, I need assistance with this, I'm looking to try to accomplish this, and they'll do anything they can to help us. >> And do you have any advice for other companies who might be interested in moving in that direction as well. >> For any small business, I think that Think Big for Small Business program is a great idea, just as long as you're willing to put the hard work in, and you can prove to AWS that you're willing to work hard, they'll reciprocate and work with you to create this great, to make you a great partner. >> And I'd love to hear more about your company, DLZP Group, tell us about your core market. >> So we actually were split between three different main markets. We try to be equal between public sector, private sector and federal. We are just starting our federal journey. We recently became AA certified, so we're looking to expand in the federal journey, but for us, we try to make sure that we are, we don't have too strong, we don't have more than like 33% of our income coming from any one sector, just because if there's a crisis like with the federal, when they shut down for six months, I don't want to have to layoff my employees, I value my employees too much have to say, I'm sorry, I have to lay you off. So we made sure we're resilient, and we're able to handle any customer at any given time. >> Well, let's talk about resilience, I mean, how do you ensure that you're resilient? Obviously, you've had some really tough time, in the last year or so with a pandemic, I mean, what's your advice for companies that are looking to become even more resilient in the years ahead? >> For us, I think a big thing is we've always worked hard to make sure that we offer a quality product for our customers. So that really helped us on the downtime's. When everybody was struggling, keep the doors open, our customers stood by us, because we've had a proven track record to make sure that we offer them the best solution, were there for them when they need us. So they came to rely on us and they would use this with during the past year during the pandemic. >> And if you could outline just in further detail your business model for our viewers. >> So we actually are 100% remote, and I have staff around the world. We purposely, strategically, like have everybody around the world, because some of our customers are global. We have to offer 24/7 support for them, especially nowadays. But another part was because of disaster recovery. I'm based in Houston, Texas. So we're known for getting hurricanes, that means sometimes I can be without power for three weeks. But I don't want that to affect my customers, I don't want them to feel that they can't come to us, but knowing that if a hurricane comes through, I might know my employees are going to be able to work. So we made sure that we have a great disaster recovery plan, we have where no matter what happens, manmade or natural disaster, we're able to support our customers, without any with any without a pause. And then we also make sure that all of our employees, they have a quality work life balance, and I think that also helps because that shows the clients, that we value our employees, and it makes them want to work with us more, because our employees are happy, they're happy to work with us, because they know that well (crackling drowns out speaker) >> And describe to us in greater detail, the core technology and its key benefits. >> Well, a lot we do is around AWS. So, when we first started with them, as I mentioned, we started with them with the test drive and ERP applications, but then we expanded our services, we started working with serverless, when we first heard about serverless, we were like this is a game changer. We can do almost anything on serverless and save so much money. So we years ago, we went and built our website, so it's 100% serverless. So it costs us a couple pennies a month to run, versus if you think about a traditional website, that's a couple hundred dollars a month to run, and then we started playing with machine learning. So we're now developing internal projects, where we're using machine learning for a number of applications, and we're going to keep expanding, where we're going to have a full suite of applications to give to our customers that will be run at 100% serverless using machine learning. >> Yeah, really terrific. What are your goals for the next year? What is your vision for 2021? >> My goal is to do a little bit more than federal, we're actually expanding to Canada as well. So we have officially launched there, we have employees in Canada that are working in different areas in different provinces and with the federal government to try to help AWS grow there. >> Terrific, and I thought it was just so fascinating, how you're mitigating disaster, and you know, really pushing your business forward, you know, thinking geographically, and that's something that we kind of had to all figured out with a pandemic. So in a way your business has been like a bit of step ahead of the others, and what other ways are you trying to kind of be a step ahead of the curve from the competition. >> So we're looking to stay ahead of the curve by making sure we have the right resources in place, so we do a lot, making sure that when we bring somebody on, we make sure that they're aware that this is a team based company, you're not going to be working individually on one project. We were very big on spec, so we're always making sure that, no matter what level you come in, even if you're just an intern here for the summer, you're running a project, you're getting that real world experience, you're going to even have times where I'm reporting to you, when you have to make sure I'm a accountable for the work. And that helps also build respect amongst the peers, because they know what it takes to run a project, and they're going to make sure that they do a good job, because nobody wants to see their peers if you fail. >> Yeah, well excellent insights, I agree with you. Lisa Brunet, a managing partner and president of the DLZP Group. That's all for this session, I'm your host Natalie Erlich, thank you so much for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Woman: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector awards for the award of best migration solution. I'm your host Natalie Erlich and now we're joined by very special guests. We have Omer Enaam, application modernization leader at Deloitte Consulting and Bart Mason, technology lead for the Office of Recovery Services at the Utah Department of Human Services. Welcome, gentlemen. Good to have you on the show. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Well, terrific. I'd love to hear more about your migration from mainframe to AWS. Bart. Let's start with you. >> The state of Utah has a mainframe system and we have our child support application that was first developed in 1996 on the mainframe written in COBOL. The application served us well through the 24 years that we had it running on the mainframe. The issue was that the mainframe, it was getting difficult to find people who knew how to program in COBOL. But the biggest problems were any type of modernization. We were pretty much stuck to using what are called green screens, and there was no real easy way to do any type of modernization. And a lot of our applications that were public-facing or employee-facing, a lot of those web applications had to be written in a separate system and set up to connect and talk to the mainframe system. So it was a system that served us well but it was time to try and figure out what are we going to do about this? Because the mainframe was expensive and it was old technology that didn't let us advance to where we wanted to go in the future. So roughly about 2016, we started to investigate what are the possible ways that we can migrate our child support application off the mainframe. And we went through discussion such as a complete rewrite where we would start from the very beginning and rewrite our child support application. The child support application is a case management and an accounting system. And if we would have done a total rewrite we were told it would be upwards of $200 million to do a complete rewrite. We started looking at other possibilities and came across one possibility, and that is to do a migration off of the mainframe into the cloud. It would be a pre-session where we could do a lift and shift and basically take the code, change it into Java, and put it into the cloud running in EC2 instances. So it was an, we called it an intermediate step to modernization because it would get us one step to where we need to do, or where we need to go. And for modernization, it helps us to, since the program that it was, or the language it was migrated to was Java it made it so that we could do modernization. And we decided that if we did a lift and shift from the mainframe to AWS, that we could modernize at our own pace, we could modernize screen by screen or function by function. So it gave us the ability to control roll-outs and getting our application to where we needed to be. >> Terrific. And Omer, I'd love it if you could weigh in as well. What were, what was the support that you provided towards this migration? >> Yeah, of course. So as Bart pointed out, the state was looking for a approach that had high chance of success, high probability of user adoption with minimal impact to the organization. At the same time, have the ability to for the state to maintain and modernize at their own pace. So we work with Bart and explain to him a few options. And one of the options was using a automated coding data conversion approach where we take legacy programming languages like COBOL and convert them into Java. Just like translating the code from one language to another. And in the process, we guarantee that your your new system will work exactly. It will be functionally equal of what you do currently. And at the same time, it minimizes the risk. And it also allows the state to have no issues with their business continuity and additional training for their staff. So in a nutshell, we brought in a solution demonstrated to Bart and team and they bought into that, the idea that this is exactly what they want to do as a first step. And as we speak, we are working with the state to help them take that system in the cloud to the next level. Now we have unlocked the potential of digital transformation. Bart can build mobile apps in front of that application. That the state can. There are new analytics capabilities for that their employees can be more productive in providing services to the citizen. They can implement native capabilities from AWS to implement a process automation, implement some artificial intelligence-based tools to optimize the processes and make life easy and better for the employees, at the same time more importantly, serve the citizens in a better way. >> Mhm. And Bart I'd love it If you could share some further details on some of the considerations that you had such as risk and whether it could be used later in the future. >> The biggest thing, the biggest risk to us was that if we, as we migrated off the mainframe, there's a risk that we have to recertify our system with the Office of Child Support Enforcement in Washington, DC. When we build a system, the child support system, we're required to have them come in and do a assessment of our application and certify that it is an application that can be used for child support. If we would have done a rebuild from scratch, the risk would be that first a rebuild, from what we've seen can take anywhere from five to 10 years. I've already touched on how expensive it is, but it takes up to five or what we've seen, up to 10 years to do a complete rewrite. And the risk for us was that if we did a complete rewrite, we would still be on the mainframe for quite a long time. And we would have to have our system recertified with OCSE. And that can take anywhere from five to 10 years for a recertification too, so the risk was that if we did anything with the complete rewrites it would be several, several years going through rewrites and recertifications to get our system up and running in AWS. And the other problem would be that taking that amount of time would also, it would bring us probably not up to date with the current technologies as we did our rewrite because we'd be focused on rewriting that application and not taking advantages of services and applications that come up and can help us with our rewrites. So one of the biggest risks was that we'd have to do recertification with OCSE, With the migration, coming off the migration because it is a one for one migration where it went from COBOL to Java, we did not have to do a recertification. This allowed us to move the application as is and it functioned the exact same way that recertification was not a problem for us. OCSE said that, told us that it was not a risk or an issue that we'd have to take on. So the biggest risk was recertification for us but with the migration and moving into the cloud we went through their security processes and we came out without any big issues coming out of that. >> Fantastic. Thank you. Omer. I'd love to go to you now. What are some of the unique benefits of working with AWS? >> Sure. I think the biggest benefit is there, the extensive services that are available and having the the proven platform where you cut down your operational costs drastically. So comparing the mainframe costs with the Amazon cloud costs. Clearly the state has benefited a lot from the from a savings standpoint, infrastructure savings standpoint, and at the same time now, as I said, the the system is in the cloud, running on open architecture in the Java programming language, The AWS cloud provides us several capabilities natively which allows the state to use, to digitally transform the experience for the citizens and employees by implementing modern DevOps practices for for managing the, operating the system providing new capabilities to workers and supervisors for analytics to business process automation, having better call center integration capabilities and so forth. So there are endless opportunities. And the state is in the process of executing on a prioritized list Just before the pandemic hit, we worked with the state to lay out the future for their system and for their organization in the form of a one day innovation lab, where major stakeholders from the state gathered with Deloitte and we worked through a prioritization process and determined how we can take this system to the next level and really digitally transform the system and in the process, provide new services and better services to state employees and the citizens. >> Yeah. Terrific insight there. Now Bart, I'd like to shift it to you, asking the same question. What are your thoughts on working with AWS? Why choose them for this? >> We always have been looking at moving a lot of our applications into the cloud. We've been looking at that for several years. The advantages of moving to AWS is, from my point of view, and state's point of view, is that AWS provides a lot of services and it provides the capability for us to do a lot more for our applications. So for example, when we were on the mainframe, one of the biggest problems that we had was disaster recovery. We had a disaster recovery site in the Southern end of our states with another mainframe that we would sync up with our application. The problem was that we have over a hundred data connections. We connect to banks, external entities, internal entities. We have different types of connections. We have to do printing. We have to print checks and several things. Disaster recovery on the mainframe was something that we were never really capable of doing. We could get our application up and running but it just sat on the mainframe. We had no data connections, all that was extremely difficult and extremely expensive to do for disaster recovery on a mainframe and on alternate sites. Moving to AWS, one of the biggest things for us was that disaster recovery requirement. Because now that we're in AWS, it makes it more easier for us to spin up servers once servers go down, restore servers when they go down. We have all of our data connections in one location, and as systems become unrecoverable or have issues, it's easy for us to spin up another one or several in their place, or even our data connection, because they're all located in one place and we're using them all of the time. So disaster recovery was one of the big key components for us. The other component was that, as we modernize our application, we're looking at what AWS services are out there to help us with modernization. We're looking at services such as AWS Batch to replace our batch system. We're looking at databases to replace the current database that we're using. We're looking at using containers to containerize our applications and our ORSIS application, and also microservices. So moving off the mainframe was the first step and putting it all into servers on an EC2 instance. But then we look and say, okay, how can we do this and make this more modern and run better and more efficient? And then we started looking at all the AWS services that are out there, that run outside of an EC2 instance, for example. And we see that there's an endless possibility, and endless capabilities that we have at our fingertips to say, okay, we're off the mainframe less modernize by moving to Batch or let's start looking at containers and things like that to help us with our applications. So disaster recovery and the available services that we can move to to help us with our applications, what we look at. >> Well, thank you both so much for your insights, Bart Mason, Utah Department of Human Services as well as Omer Enaam, Deloitte Consulting and LLP. I'm your host for theCUBE. Thanks so much for watching. (outro music)

>>from the cube studios in Palo alto in boston connecting >>with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cute conversation. Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global public sector Partner awards. I'm your host, Natalie ehrlich. Today we'll discuss the award for the most customer obsessed mission based win for state and local government. I'm pleased to introduce our guests for today's session Todd, Carey, Global Head West Business group Cognizant and David. Sullivan chief executive officer of Elizabeth river crossings. Thank you gentlemen for joining the program. >>Thanks >>Thanks Todd. >>I'd love to start with you. How are companies thinking about cloud today in their businesses? >>Well, there's some, some really exciting developments but at the heart of a cloud is changing the way companies interact with their customers, their suppliers and the way they think about business. And at cognizant it is really a customer first customer centric approach and then we work our way back to a solution. But most of the time, cloud decisions are not really made from a cost optimization or cost take out point of view. They're made from a customer experience or a business driver point of view. And how do we make businesses better? More, more scalable, more agile, more flexible and we've really built some some really great solutions that are industry specific and we've loved working with the R. C. In this capacity. >>How about you? I'd love to get your insight. Um As well. David, what what what do you see is like the main challenges and also how next gen technologies like you know, five G. Can help alleviate in those issues. >>Um Yes. First, it, like Todd said that, you know, the customer has an expectation and that expectation is raised every day by what they experienced in every other channel they work in and shop in and whatever they're doing so, so expectations are always increasing from the customer side, responsiveness personalization. They want to see all of that in everything they do, including paying their told bill. Um, and so I think as technology has changed, you know, tolling has kind of come from technology that is really 2030 years old or older. Uh, two more of a modern influence. And today we use R. F. I. D. Tags that are embedded in things like EZ Pass. But in the future it will be, it'll be your, your mobile device or your automobile itself that that triggers a total transaction and helps us process it and making in a way that is fast, convenient and most importantly accurate. >>Yeah. Well staying with you, David, I'd love to hear how working with AWS helped modernize your systems and as well as if you could give us some insight on your tracking systems. >>Yes. So with AWS, we have been working with Cognizant. Cognizant is our tolling subcontractor. So they are responsible for providing our tolling system. And we had what I would call a typical legacy tolling system. We had to data centers, both of them located pretty close together, a primary and a redundant data center and both of them very close to flood prone areas. And in our location in the southeast corner of Virginia were very vulnerable to tropical storms and tidal flooding. So part of our concern was, you know, we're exposed all our infrastructure, all our tolling infrastructure is exposed. So as we began to pursue a cloud strategy, uh the first idea was just to lift everything out of our environment and move it to a W. S. And Cognizant pull that off in about three months, uh which is really pretty incredible and we never missed a beat. Uh You know, we did it over a three day holiday weekend, but from a business transaction standpoint it all flowed once in the cloud. We began to rethink now that we're out of these legacy hardware environments, How do we get out of the legacy application environment and embrace what the cloud enables and working closely with Cognizant who had a great vision for how this could be achieved. We were able to, you know, systematically move through and migrate to a cloud first cloud oriented uh system. And uh you know, it's given us lower cost, increased availability and most importantly for our customer service agents that deal with customers or customers that deal with the web, it's given them a better experience uh shorter call times, better information and you know, and and frankly better customer satisfaction. >>Terrific. Well, thank you for that Todd. Let's shift to you. What do you see as the next phase of this digital transformation process? >>Well, as David hidden, I think it's an important theme of cloud first. I mean most companies in our clients start with that cloud forest, cloud native mentality. But for cognizant, our cloud approach is really customer first and being able to start with the client in mind and then work our way back into a technology staff or into a scalable solution. But specifically for the coal industry, there's a lot of things that are needed around revenue, predictability and looking at potential leakages. But as we hit on already of making sure that we're really delivering a great customer experience. And so with our solution, as we expect our tolling solution to really grow, we're keeping it cloud native, we're keeping it modular in nature and integration ready. So for example, are total customers can use their own roadside solutions or hand picked some of the small back office modules that they want to use. It's always going to be purpose bill and align to our customer and we see nothing but growth in this segment. It's very exciting. >>Yeah. Terrific. Well, David, you know, now that you've actually implemented this, what do you see as the next phase? What is your vision um for the future for your business in 2021? >>Well, I think, you know, for for us moving forward, um you know, we've been in this uh as Todd said, kind of a modular approach, which is great because you can make the changes and really manage your risk while you're making them. Um so you're you're moving small things. Whereas traditionally new systems meant massive investments, long, long time implementation times and you know, all in cut overs, all of which are packed with risk. So, you know, we want to reduce our risk and the solution that we have being cloud native allows us to really incrementally and quickly, just continually to improve the system. So you know, on our forecast, we would like to have a better insight into our customers and you know, support a direct app, Annie R. C. App that would allow our customers to interact with us and give us a better view of the customer um and a better experience for the customer overall. But you know, we, our goal is to build that total transaction accurately fairly. And then if the customer has an issue to be able to treat them in a way that uh that they feel respected and and valued as a customer because we we do look at it that way. >>Yeah, Terrific. I mean obviously, you know, engagement such an important issue in this area. Now I'd like to shift gears and here a little bit more about, you know, what are some of the other applications that cognizant could provide beyond tolling and let's shift this to Todd? >>Well, David had done a little bit, there's there's a lot of when we start to focus on the customer, there's a lot of opportunity there on the front side. So mobile apps, websites, the synchronization of data, but then also the way that we support that customer interacting with that data. Things like I've er automating, call centers, being able to support that customer through the entire chain of custody. There's some new and exciting applications now that we come out and David touched on a little bit too in terms of vehicles. So the vehicles to everything type motion. That's an exciting development in this segment as well to be able to continually integrate everything that's in the customer ecosystem. So whether that's uh, the, the need to pay a bill or be able to drive a car through a gate and be able to simply not touch anything but be able to have that all the way that payment process all the way through and have clear visibility into usage and insights. And then also be able to turn all that data over to a company like er, C to make good decisions based on what they see in terms of buying patterns, consumption, etcetera. There's a lot of expansion going on in this and the greatest part about this is it's built on the AWS platform. So when we architect something in a cloud native way, we can rapidly expanded and we can really streamline the investment required to jump start any kind of innovation and best of all our customers in keeping with the best model, really only pay for the actual traffic that they use so we can keep those long term costume. >>Yeah. Well, excellent point. Thank you both gentlemen for joining our program. Really loved having you. And uh, you know, that was Todd, Cary and David. Sullivan. Excuse me. And I'm your host, Natalie or like, Thank you for watching. >>Mm hmm. Mm.

>>Mhm. >>What? >>Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global public sector partner awards for today's award for the award of best partner transformation, best global expansion. I'm your host Natalie ehrlich and now I'm very pleased to introduce you to our next guest. They are James Lester Global Managing Director, public Safety attic censure. And Lauren a thoroughly director of performance analytics and research of the Seattle Police Department. Welcome gentlemen, it's wonderful to have you on the program. >>Thanks for having us >>terrific. Well, we're going to talk a lot about data and a lot about public safety and how, you know, data analytics analytics is making a big impact um in the public safety world. So do tell us I'd like to start with you James. Uh tell us how X enters intelligent public safety platform turns data into a strategic asset. >>Thanks Natalie. Well, the intelligent public safety platform is all about combining different data sets together and taking a platform approach to using data within public safety. What it does is it allows us to bring a whole host of different types of data together in one place, put that through a series of different analytical transactions and then visualize that information back to where however within the public safety environment needs it and really does four key things. One is, it helps with situational awareness, helps the officer understand the situation that they're in and gives them insight to help support and guide them. Secondly it helps enhance investigations. So how do you join those dots? How do you help navigate and speed up complex investigations by better understanding a range of data sets. And thirdly it really helps with force management and understanding the behavior and the activities within the force and how best to use those critical assets of police officers and police staff themselves. And then finally what it does is it really looks at digital evidence management. How do you actually manage data effectively as an asset within the force? So those are the four key things. And certainly with our work at Seattle we've really focused on that force management area. >>Yeah. Thanks for mentioning that. Now let's shift to Lauren tell us how has I PSP you know, really helped your staff make some key contributions towards public safety in the city of Seattle. >>Yeah. Thanks. Uh so you know I think our business intelligence journey started maybe a little in advance of the I. P. S. P. With our partnership With accenture on the data analytics platform. And we've been taking that, say my PSP approach since 2015 as part of our efforts to comply with a federal consent decree. So, you know, I think what what we probably don't understand necessarily is that most police departments build sort of purpose built source systems to onboard data and make good use of them. But that doesn't necessarily mean that that data is readily available. So, um, you know, we've been able to demonstrate compliance with the elements of a settlement agreement for our consent decree, but we've also been able to do a whole host of research projects designed to better understand how police operate in the criminal logical environment, how they perform and um, and really make the best use of those assets as we have them deployed around the city doing law enforcement work. >>Terrific. Now, James, let's shift to you one of the kind of key dilemmas here in the sectors. You know, how can you utilize these um, new technologies in policing, um, and law enforcement while still building trust with the public? >>Absolutely. I mean, I do think that it is critical that public safety agencies are able to use the benefits of new technology, criminals are using technology in all sorts of different ways. Uh and it's important that policing and public safety organizations are able to exploit the advantages that we now see through technology and the ability to understand and analyze data. But equally, it's critical that these implemented in ways that engage and involve the public, that the way in which the analytics and analysis is conducted is open and transparent, so people understand how the data is being used, uh and also that officers themselves are part of the process when these tools are built and developed, so they gain a thorough understanding of how to use them and how to implement them. So, being open and transparent in the way that these platforms are built is absolutely critical. >>Yeah, that's an excellent point because clearly bad actors are already using data. Um, so we might as well use it to help, you know, the good actors out there and help the public. So in your opinion, Lauren, um, you know, what is the next phase of this kind of model? Um, what are you hoping to do next with this kind of technology? >>So as we use this technology as we understand more about it, we're really building data curiosity within the management group at SPD. So really sort of, I would say the first phase of a business intelligence platform in policing is about orienting people to the problem, how many of these things happen at what time and where do they happen around the city? And then beginning to build better questions from the people who are actually doing the business of delivering police service in the city and the future of that, I think is taking that critical feedback and understanding how to respond with really more intelligence services, predictive services that help to kind of cut through that just general descriptive noise and provide insights to the operation in a city that has About 900,000 dispatches in a year. It's difficult to pinpoint which dispatches are of interest to police managers, which crimes which calls may be of interest to the city at large as they manage public safety and risk management. And so are, you know, sort of future development agenda. Our road map, if you will for the next several years is really focused on developing intelligent processes that make use of all of that data, boil it down to what's critically important and help direct people who are most familiar with the operation. To those uh those events, those critical pieces of insight that might be helpful in allowing them to make better management decisions. >>Yeah. And what what are some of the key areas that you find this platform can be effective in terms of uh you know public safety, certain criminal activities James. >>Um I think the PSP has a wide range of applications so certainly looking at how we can bring a whole range of data together that previously has maybe been locked away in individual silos or separate systems. So public safety agencies are really able to understand what they know and the information that they have and make it much easier to access and understand that information. Um I also think it's allowing us to perform levels of analytics and therefore insight on those data sets, which previously public safety agencies have have struggled to do. Um And in the case of Seattle focusing on the uh force management aspect, I think it's helped them understand the activities and behavior of their workforce um in context and in relation to other events and other activities to a much greater depth than they've been able to do previously. >>Terrific. Well, Lauren obviously, you know, this was a really tough year with Covid. What impact did the pandemic have on your operations and some of your more modern policing efforts? >>Oh, I mean, obviously it radically changed the way that we deploy forces in the organization beginning early in March. Uh you know, like most of the world, we all moved home trying to keep up the pace of development and continue to manage the operation. But as that was happening, you know, people are still living their lives out in the world and out in the city. So we pretty quickly found ourselves trying to adapt to that new use of public spaces, trying to identify problems in an environment that really doesn't look anything like the previous couple of years that we were working in, uh and uh, you know, data and and really sort of the availability of technology that helps too identify what's new and what's interesting and rapidly develop those insights and get them available for police managers was critical and helping us identify things like trends in potential exposure events. So being able to identify uh, you know, just exactly how many calls involve the use of personal protective equipment, use that to forecast potential exposure for our workforce. Be able to track exposure reports in the field to be able to determine whether there are staffing concerns that need to be considered. Uh and all of that. Uh you know, we're able to pretty rapidly prototype and deploy dashboards and tools that help folks, especially the command staff, have kind of a global sense for how the operation is functioning as the environment is literally shifting underneath them as uh, you know, uh the use of public spaces is changing and as dispatch procedures are changing as public policy is changing related to, you know, things like jail booking availability and public health and safety policies. The department was able to stay on top of those key metrics and really make sort of the best minute by minute decisions based in the data. And that's really not something that's been available, uh You know, without sort of the ready availability of data at your fingertips and the ability to rapidly prototype things that direct people to what's important. >>Yeah, thank you for that. Now, James, I'd love to hear your comments on that. I mean, has the pandemic altered or, you know, given you any kind of fresh perspective on uh you know, modern policing efforts using these kinds of platforms? >>Well, I think that the pandemic has shown the importance of using data in new and different ways. I mean, one thing the pandemic certainly did was see a shift in in crime types. You know, traditional street based volume crime declined, where we saw increases in cyber and online crime. And therefore the flexibility that police services have had to have in order to shift how they combat changing crime types has meant that they've had to be able to use data as they say, in new and different ways. And think about how can they be more disruptive in their tactics? How can they get new types of insight and really platforms like the intelligent public safety platform help them become much more flexible and much more nimble and that's certainly something that's been required as a result of the pandemic. >>Yeah, that's really great to hear. Um you know, Lauren going to you, I'd love to hear how specifically I PSP was able to help you uh you know, the Seattle Police department as well as statewide inquiries and end investigations. What kind of enhancements were you able to receive from that? >>Uh Well, you know, I mean in terms of investigations, uh the way that Seattle deploys the intelligent public safety platform, our focus is really primarily on deployment of resources that force management, the accountability, piece of things. And so from our perspective, the ability to onboard new data sources quickly uh and make use of that information in a kind of a rapid sort of responsive function was really critical for us but um you know, certainly and I think as as most communities are exploring new ways of approaching community safety, uh the intelligent public safety platform uh for us was really effective in being able to answer those, those questions that are coming up as as people are reforming the way that policing is deployed in their communities, were able to reach out and see just exactly how many hours are spent on one particular function over another, something that perhaps could be available for a co responder model, or take a look at, you know, this sort of natural experiment that we have out in our criminal logical environment as people are using spaces differently. And as we are approaching enforcement policy differently, being able to take a look at what are the effects of perhaps not arresting people for certain types of crime? Do we see some displacement of those effects across different crime types? Do we see an increase in harm in other areas of the operation? Have we seen you know increases in one particular crime type while another one declines? How is the environment responding these rapid changes and what really is a natural experiment occurring out in the world? >>Yeah I mean it's really incredible um Having all that data at our fingertips and really being able to utilize it to have a fuller perspective of what's really happening right? What what do you think James? >>Yeah. I mean I think being able to really utilize different data sets is something that police forces are seeing to become more and more important. Um They're recognizing that becoming increasingly data lead can really help improve their performance. Um And the challenge to date has really been how do we bring those data sets together but not then require police officers to way through reams and reams of data. I mean the volumes of data now that organizations are having to manage is huge. And so really the power of the I. P. S. P. Is being able to filter through all of that data and really deliver actionable insight. So something that the police officer can go and do something with and really make a difference around. Um And that's something that that's absolutely critical. And modern day policing is increasingly having this data driven evidence based approach to help make it far more effective and really focused on the needs of its citizens. >>Yeah and as you mentioned, I mean the algorithms are really driving this you know, um giving us these actionable insights but how can we ensure that they're acting fairly to all the stakeholders James. I'd like you to answer this please. >>Um Absolutely. I mean, trust and confidence within policing is absolutely paramount. Uh and whilst the use of these sorts of tools, I think is critical to helping keep communities in the public safe. It's very important that these tools are deployed in an open transparent way. And part of that is understanding the algorithms, making sure that algorithmic fairness is built in so that these are tested and any sort of bias or unintended consequences are understood and known and factored in to the way in which the tools are both built and used. Um, and then on top of that, I think it's open, it's important that these are open and transparent, that it's clear how and why departments are using these technologies. And it's also critical that the officers using them are trained and understood how to use them and how to use the insights that they're starting to deliver. >>Yeah, and thanks for mentioning that Lauren, what kind of training are you providing your staff at the Seattle police department And you know, how do you see this evolving in the next few years >>with regard to algorithmic fairness, what kind of training along those lines or training >>with the I. P. S. P. And all these other kinds of technologies that you're embracing now to help with your public safety initiatives? >>Well, you know, I think one of the one of the real benefits to becoming an evidence based organization, a truly evidence led organization is that you don't have to train folks uh to use data. What you have to do is leverage data to make it work and be really infused with their everyday operations. So we, you know, we have police officers and we have managers and we have commanders and they've got a very complex set of tasks that they've been trained to work with. It's really sort of our mission to be trained in, how to identify uh you know, the correct UX UI design, how to make sure that the insights that are being directed to those folks are really tailored to the business they're operating. And so to that extent, the analytical staff that we have is really focused on sort of continuous improvement and constant learning about how we can be mindful of things like bias and the algorithms and the various systems that we're deploying uh and also be up to date on the latest and how police operations really are sort of deployed around the city and ways that we can infuse those various management functions or those police service functions with data and analytics that are just naturally working with people's business sense and they're uh really sort of primary function, which is the delivery of police service >>terrific. Well, James lastly with you um just real quick you know, what are your thoughts in terms of being able to extend the power of I. P. S. P. Beyonce Seattle uh in the broader United States? >>Well I mean I think my PSP has huge applicability to any public safety agency in in the US and beyond and we're already seeing other agencies around the world interested in using it and deploying it um Where they basically want to get uh and be able to utilize a wider range of data where they want to be able to drive greater insight into that that data set um Where they want to be confident in deploying open and fair algorithms um to really make a difference. Um And if we to take the the specific example of the U. S. And the work that we've done with Seattle then I think tools like the intention public safety platform have a huge part to play in the wider reimagining of policing within the US in understanding officer and departmental behavior and actually opening up and sharing information with citizens that increased levels of trust and transparency between public safety agencies and the communities and citizens that they serve. >>And you know, on that note, do you think that I PSP is useful in terms of collaboration efforts, you know, with other police departments, perhaps in other states? Um you know or just just as a global national effort. Lauren, do you see that kind of potential in the future? >>Yeah and actually we do that now. So one of the really sort of powerful things about having all of this data at your fingertips and I would say having this kind of awesome responsibility of being the steward of this type of asset for the community. Um and and really sort of for the industry at large is that we're able to take the data and rapidly develop new research projects with researchers around the world. So the Seattle Police Department maintains a network of about I think we're up to about 55 current researchers and institutions. I think we've got about 33, institutions around the world. People really working on real time problems related to the things that matter to our community right now. And having this data available at our fingertips allows us to rapidly develop data sources. We can actually get on a call with one of our researchers uh and build out a table for them to use or start exploring the data in an ad hoc querying layer layer and, you know, making visualizations and helping the researchers form better questions so that when we develop their data, when we deploy it to them, uh they can pretty quickly get in there. It's in the format that they're looking for, They understand it. They can run some tests and determine whether the data that we provided for them actually meets their needs. And if it doesn't, we can develop a new set pretty quickly. I I think that also that research function, that discovery function that were enabled through the use of these data is actually helping to bring together uh the community of law enforcement around this this idea of Collaborative understanding of how policing works around the city, you know, sorry, around the world. So of 18,000 or so law enforcement agencies in the United States, there is broad variability in people's competency in their use of data, but we're finding that agencies that have access to these types of tools or who are starting to develop access to these tools and the competencies to use them are coming together. Uh and beginning to talk about how we can understand sort of cross cultural and cross regional correlations and patterns that we see across our multiple operations. And although, you know, those are varied uh and and range around the country or even around the world, I think that that collaboration on understanding how policing works, what's normal, what's abnormal, what we can do about it is really going to be powerful in the future. >>Yeah, Well, this is really exciting. Yeah. Well, what are your thoughts? >>I was just going to build on the point that Lauren was making there because I think I think that is a really important one. Um you know, when when you look around the world, the challenges that different public safety and policing agencies face are actually dramatically similar um and the ability for policing organizations to come together and think about how they use data, think about how they use data in a fair and transparent way is something we're really starting to see and that ability to share insight to experiment um and really make sure that you're bringing lots of different insight together to further the way in which police forces all over the world can actually help keep their citizens safe and combat what is an increasingly rapidly and evolving threat. Landscape is something that we see tools like the intelligent public safety platform really helping to do and if one police force starts to use it in a certain way in one jurisdiction and has success there, there is definitely the ability to share that insight with others and get this global pool of understanding and knowledge all furthering the level of safety and security that can be delivered to communities in the public. >>Terrific. Well, thank you both so much for your insights has been really fantastic to hear. You know, how these new technologies are really coming to the aid of public safety officials and helping secure the public. That was Lauren a thoroughly director of performance analytics and research at the Seattle police Department and James Schlesser. Global Managing Director, Public Safety at its center. And I'm Natalie early, your host for the cube and that was our session for the AWS Global Public uh, partner Awards. Thank you very much for watching. >>Mm

>>Mhm >>Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards And I'm delighted to introduce our next guests. They are chris Saks Ceo of think stack and Michael Matthews President Ceo at mutual Credit Union. I'm your host for the cube Natalie. Ehrlich of course. And we're going to highlight the most impactful nonprofit partner award. Thank you gentlemen for joining the program. >>Thank you so much for having us. >>Terrific. Well delighted for you to be here. And Michael, I'd love to start with you. How did you figure out that cloud technology was critical to the future of mutual credit union? >>It's kind of by chance, Natalie, we're sitting down, we're looking at uh, racks of equipment in our I. T. Room and trying to keep everything up to date, um software updated, become a full time job and all of my staff and sat around and it come to a point where we were spending more time keeping upgrades, keeping servers upgraded. And we asked we reached out the things that they were a network provider at the time and we said, hey, whatever, what are our options? And they came back with several options and one of them was a W. S. And we explored it and uh we've not looked back. >>Terrific. Well, can you explain in further detail how you identified some of the gaps and what stood out to you about think stack, how this uh collaboration happened specifically? >>Well, some of the major gaps that you have is, you know, we're in Vicksburg Mississippi and I would say it's probably not the I. T mecca of the United States and staffing. What was a huge requirement for us if you're gonna make a move such as this, you've got to have the staffing and then along with the staffing is okay if you go out and we hire all these individuals to help help with this journey, are they going to become bored and you know, if we uh personally, if if I asked think stack, they would say, oh yes, don't do that hire us, but that's their job there, there there are parker vendor and so we went out, we asked other vendors that we use and what are the chances of us doing this and it was slim to none. And this type of technology you want, somebody who you can call and and all honesty, I want to be able to call chris and say chris, I'm having a problem versus, you know, one of my team called me and say we're having a problem, I'd rather call it and I love the vendor relationship. It has worked out well. Our major gaps in staffing though, Natalie >>what about staffing? >>That was our major gap. >>Oh God, it got it. Well, chris let's move on to you now. I'd love it if you could explain, you know, in some detail for our audience about the methodology of your company and also how you help your clients visualize their transformation processes. >>Yeah, for sure. Thanks Natalie. So we work with credit unions around the country and many of them are facing similar challenges to Michael at mutual. And in addition to staffing, they're often challenged with just the uncertain future of technology and that can include things like hurricanes, wildfires, various different disasters, pandemics and having to work remotely. But it also includes all of the opportunities that exist in transformative technologies for credit union. They need to keep pace with organizations like Robin Hood and stash and some of these other organizations that are providing cutting edge mobile apps and technology to their customers. And so how do you as an organization generally, that's a small nonprofit organization. How do you build the technology that will allow you to have a foundation to respond and react to whatever the world happens to throw actually, be that an opportunity to take advantage of for growth or some kind of risk from a cyber attack to a natural disaster. So what we try to do with our clients is take a very human centered approach first. And the idea behind that is to not walk in the door and talk about all the wonderful benefits of AWS or any other particular technology, but rather look at What do you expect. So if you take Michael, for example, you know, sitting down with him and trying to look out 10 years, what do you expect the industry to look like? What do you expect your organization to look like in? What goals do you have as a credit? You need to take advantage of those opportunities and to mitigate those risks. Once you identify those business needs, we can start looking at the humans that are involved in that experience. And so that would obviously be the employees and partners and vendors that support and make up the team at the credit union. And then obviously it's their current members and then any other members that they want to attract. And so you have to look at both sides of this. How how do you work securely efficiently? Um, as an employee on the flip side, how do you serve your members as well as you can serve them with cutting edge technology with technology that's always up and available. And then obviously with, with utmost security. So as we identify and build that picture, uh, we we generally do that with stick figures Natalie so we try to go in and and you know take um different personas and we use journey mapping and we use strategic foresight and various other exercise that help us uh literally paint a picture. Um and then from there we kind of back into that and say okay in order for you to accomplish these things into Have the organization that you want to have the next 10 years, what is your technology foundation and footprint need to look like to support that. And that's where we start to then back into that design which typically would include some type of public cloud services like AWS among other technologies from a cyber security perspective to build out that foundation and then allow them To respond and react to whatever the world throws at him over the next 10 years. >>Terrific. Well Michael would love to get your insight. How did you experience that human centered design focus, that think stack uh you know, is known for >>I think that's what says things take apart. You know, we there's numerous vendors you can go direct, there's there's plenty of software, there's plenty of technology out there you can buy. And as a credit union we can go out, we can just about get anything we wanted. But when we have a problem that we're trying to solve, it's not about that, it's about sitting down with chris his team and saying chris this this is a problem. We recently had one in password management, but we just this is a problem we're having. How do we solve this problem? And so the focus is not about trying to sell you another software. The focus is about solving the problem and having your staff and your team work more efficiently and effectively at their task. At the end of the day, you know, we're not arty people were in the financial service business. We rely on the solutions that we have to to help us do our jobs better and serve our members more effectively. >>Yeah, well, chris uh, you know, from your perspective, obviously human centered designed a really big component of your business, but what other key feature set your business apart from the competitive landscape? >>So I think the human centered design bleeds into another area that we really pride ourselves on, which is which is education and what I will call plain talk. So again, as Michael said, these organizations are our financial services, they're not technology experts, so you need to be able to communicate to those teams, those boards of directors, executive teams in a way that they can understand, and it can be uh somewhat difficult to talk about complex technical problems, um but when you boil it down back to that experience level, or you boil it down to a picture, it becomes a little easier to talk about. And what we want to be able to do as a partner is make sure our clients have confidence in the services or the products that they're purchasing, that they understand. How is this investment going to impact our credit union? How is this going to impact our members? And is this the right investment? It investments are, are significant. So we need to make sure that both parties understand the expectations of that investment and why they're doing that. So we take a lot of pride in the education and then probably the biggest piece uh and you know, it's one of those things that can be unappreciated, but its cybersecurity building, our infrastructure's with the tools and the processes and and the techniques so that everyone stays secure. I can tell you that there is nothing that would derail a digital transformation of an organization faster than a breach. So it's very important for us to make sure that those organizations, that everything that we do as fun as it is to talk about transformational technology equally as important that everything stays secure as we do it. >>Yeah. Well, excellent point. Certainly cybersecurity going to be a top uh topic for 2021 and beyond. Now, Michael, I'd like to move to you um what were the expected and unexpected business outcomes as a result of this partnership? >>Well, now we we we expected to have issues in the transition, which we really didn't um, I'll be honest with you, we we expected to have failures of servers. We expected stuff not to work because we were told by some of our other vendors that this will not work in a W S. Um and we were very surprised that most everything worked on AWS and it worked even better. Um some of the unexpected. So one of the main drivers of us moving to AWS was, I told you we had were limited on Rackspace I T room is when we want to implement a new service today, everything requires its own server. So everything needs an independent service, virtual server or physical server. We did not know how fast that could be done. So we would send a ticket in uh and we would say, hey, we need a new server here. The specs we're putting on this vendor, this is our time frame and we will get an email back the next morning. The servers ready to go where before? We weren't we didn't have that. That that was not an option. The main delay for new projects was to build up time and we weren't expecting that speech. No longer was that we all we expected that hey, we're not in a rush, but it'll be at least three months. And so now the team has to be ready to go as soon as you send the request in that we need this server is done uh and its speed up, speed up our time from uh, the idea our concept to going live with projects and we weren't that was something we had to get adjusted to. >>Yeah. And following up on that. What were some of the rational as well as the emotional impacts as a result of this collaboration? >>All right too. Two things and I don't know if they meet their, meet your that answer your question directly. But so one item we had in in a call, it's been several weeks back is when is the last time that anyone had to call it? Said, hey, I'm not working. My my can't access the server or I can complete dysfunction. And it's not been that way. We we've seen significantly improved up time, not only externally for our members who are logging in to do home banking or any other, any other feature, but internally for our staff we saw and I think it's just the entire transformation just made our company more resilient. What that was. I was as the metric we were seeing fewer instances of downtime. If we have downtown now, it's a power. We had an ice storm here in Mississippi, which is rare. Uh and we were down for a day. Um and if you lose internet today at any business you're down um The emotional side of I tell you, and it's been several years back on July four, we had a major major failure and our entire network was down and we this is prior to us moving to AWS and I'll just tell you I go home at night, this is the peace of mind that you can't put a dollar value on. I go home at night. And the last thing I'm worried about is my I. T. Network. I'm not worried about up time, I'm not worried about members, you know, going on facebook or any other social media and saying hey we can't we can't access your site what's going on and we don't have that anymore. And you know, I'm sure we could have had it any other way. But I leave that to the process of us moving from an in house holding everything on premise to moving to AWS, not only did it want to improve the results of those servers were able to back up to do different things, but it is to improve the overall working, working the functionality of our network. And I like I said I you can't put a dollar on this peace of mind and that is something I don't think there's any metric out there. You can measure, you can't measure that, but you know me and my team, we see it all the time. So >>Yeah, I agree, a peace of mind is certainly a priceless now Chris Let's move to you if you could outline to our audience some of the solutions that you provide, some of your other clients as well. Just give us a fuller picture of the services that you provide. Let's perhaps talk about, you know, 24/7 socks um services as well as data loss prevention or anything else that you think would be of interest to our audience? >>Yeah, for sure. So so obviously we I like to think of us like we design so we come in and we like to help you design and and figure out what your network needs to look like. That's not only your server and production network but also routing, switching. So Land Win S T Win various other networking projects equally. It's important that you can access the cloud as it is to move to the cloud, help with with productivity suite collaboration tools. Um and then finally, cyber security is a big part of that as well. So we try to come in and and look at all those things on the cybersecurity side. Very similar concept of what we do on the, on the cloud side, which is well design the tools and the infrastructure on the perimeter of the network, the configuration of any cloud environments, um such that they're secure and appropriate for your organization. Uh look at active directory or whatever organizational user management system you have to be using, implement those tools. Um and then as you mentioned, Natalie, we have a 24 x seven socks um with analysts watching that um that are all things that employees watching that board responding and reacting um using our our sin platform. And then we also have a 24 by seven uh network operations center or knocked. Um that is managing both the on site uh tools and network as well as any cloud uh networks that that they may have, keeping them up to date, doing all the routine maintenance, I will say from a cyber security perspective while it's not called the sock, the knock is just as important for cybersecurity as is the knock because we see that many cybersecurity attacks are often just taking advantage of systems that are not kept up to date. So the knock and that preventative maintenance is so important. So we do that for a lot of our clients. Some people pick and choose certain features. Some people use all of our services. >>Yeah. Terrific. Is that what you mean by security that's made to order? >>Yeah, exactly. Um you know, I think that's true of all technology. Um the biggest thing that we can do his look at the systems that you have during that design phase, we not only look at what technology should be should you be using, but also we take an assessment of your current team, What talent does your team have and where can we fill gaps if you have people that are doing security really well or you're doing preventative maintenance or some of these features? Uh Certainly you should keep that in house and we'll try to build services around those individuals that you have so that you're utilizing your talent to the best of your abilities and we're really fitting in um where you need us. >>Yeah. Terrific. Well, um you know, Michael, I'd like to shift to you now. What do you think will be the broader impact, you know, for the credit union industry? If others are not, you know, adopting the same kind of technologies um you know, to secure their cloud strategies. Mhm. >>I think whether credit unions want to or not, they're moving to the cloud. Um Most of our newest vendors are all cloud based. Um And so yes, he's either do it now or do it later. Which one do you want to be? And I do think that you're going to see more and more larger credit unions begin to move and it's scalable. It's more up time. It's easier to back up. A lot of people are hesitant. They don't want to take their information and move it out of town. They try to find a local data center are somewhere secure. And, and we looked at is what's the difference? You know, we, we we don't have latency issues with internet and fiber today. And so what is the difference of movement out of town and move to AWS by moving out of town? I still on the servers. I still leased the space. I still have to go over there. We have to have somebody there at all the time. And I'll be honest with you, I look at AWS as a trusted partner versus trying someone and then, and then it's not working locally and there's a lot of data centers you can, you can move to um I think I think it's going to come to the industry one way or the other. >>Yeah. Well, Terrific. Do you have any insight or you know, perhaps advice for another credit union who will, you know, like to take the next step? But, you know, as you mentioned, maybe a bit hesitant, >>I think doing your homework on it and looking at it as a, as a viable option is the first step. I know when I took it to my board and I talked about this um with chris and several people have so we we we talk about these things like the cloud, like it's this magical space and and our data is out there in Netherland and who knows where our data is. But when you break it down, you say, I have a East Coast data center and I have a West Coast data center. These are physical spaces where my dad is higher is held. Um I think it makes people think about a little differently. And and so when when you're if you're thinking about moving, if your if your in house today and you're thinking about how I'm gonna start outsourcing evaluate the cost, what are your ongoing cost, You know, who's gonna service you, Who's going to provide that service? And we've looked at other vendors over the years and I'll tell you, chris and his team have something unique that I found. Um I found very desirable in our situation is at our size and we're just under $300 million credit union. I don't think we have major projects that are too complicated to chris we're still, we're one of his better customers. I assume, chris me tell you something different in a minute, but we're not just a number, so I wouldn't go into a cube. You know, everybody knows each other. We're both small enough companies to where they're getting a lot bigger than we are now, but they're both small of companies where we're still, we we mean something to them, they care about moving to start versus just checking the box off. And so that's that's been our journey so far. Mhm. >>Yeah. Well, um, so, chris, uh, you know, first I want to know if Michael is one of your better customers, but uh, you know, really what I would I would really like to know is um, you know, what is your like, big sales pitch to? You know, as I mentioned to Michael, just some of those companies that are a little bit hesitant, a little bit on the edge. >>Michael is our best client of course because he's here doing this interview with us. No, um, you know, that that's something for us that are those, those human connections are, are, are so important and we do get very invested with any of the clients that we work with. But, um, in, in terms of the industry, I think Michael started to say at the beginning, which is, you're already there. We hear a lot of times from folks that they, I can't move to the cloud that the examiners or that the regulations do not allow them to be there. And that's, that's not true. Um, so what we're trying to do in partnership with KWS is educate the marketplaces as well as we can. Um, one of the biggest things that the cloud offers is this idea of flexibility and nimbleness and you know, unfortunately, I think Covid taught us that lesson, but there's, there's other lessons out there. I don't want to harp on Covid, I feel like that's all we talk about. Um, but if you look at any opportunity, whether it's a I machine learning, um, you know, Blockchain, pick the next technology, right? The reality is, none of us can really tell you where you're going to be in two years, maybe one year, three years, right? Like can you truly sit down after the past three years and tell me that you with no uncertainty, can tell me where your organization is going to be. And the reality is if you build your own data center right now, you have to make that guess Because you have to build something and designed for something and if you're making that investment, then you're doing that for the next probably 5-7 years. Whereas if you move to amazon you have the flexibility, whether that's scaling your organization up quickly, whether that's moving to the cloud, whether that's leveraging one of these technologies I just mentioned or in some cases even scaling back because things have hit a recession, we don't know what the future holds. But if you're in an environment like AWS, then you have the scalability and the flexibility to be able to move and pivot with that. And if you build your own and you happen to pick the wrong future, then then you could be in a bind and you've created your own limitations because you've decided to build for yourself. And I think that's the biggest thing is you can't build for yourself. You have to be flexible in this environment. That is that is the key. And the organizations that are flexible are the ones that are going to survive and thrive through all this uncertainty. Yeah. >>Well, really excellent point there. I totally agree with you. Wonderful to have you on our program. That was chris Saks Ceo of think stack as well as Michael Matthews, the president and Ceo at Mutual Credit Union. Thank you gentlemen for joining the show. Thanks so much. And that's all for this session of the AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm your host Natalie or like thanks for >>watching. Mm.