>>Hey everyone, and welcome back to Las Vegas. Viva Las Vegas, baby. This is the Cube live at AWS Reinvent 2022 with tens of thousands of people. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. Dave, we've had some great conversations. This is day one of four days of wall to wall coverage on the cube. We've been talking data. Every company is a data company. Data protection, data resiliency, absolutely table stakes for organizations to, >>And I think ecosystem is the other big theme. And that really came to life last year. You know, we came out of the pandemic and it was like, wow, we are entering a new era. People no longer was the ecosystem worried about it, AWS competing with them. They were more worried about innovating and building on top of AWS and building their own value. And that's really, I think, the theme of the 2020s within the ecosystem. >>And we're gonna be talking about building on top of aws. Two guests join us, two alumni join us. Stephen Manley is here, the CTO of Druva. Welcome back. Jason crat as well is here. CIO and CTO of Summit Carbon Solutions. Guys, great to have you back on the program. >>Thank you. >>Let's start with you giving the audience an understanding of the company. What do you guys do? What do you deliver value for customers? All that good >>Stuff. Yeah, no, for sure. So Summit Carbon is the world's largest carbon capture and sequestration company capturing close to 15 million tons of carbon every year. So it doesn't go into the atmosphere. >>Wow, fantastic. Steven, the, the risk landscape today is crazy, right? There's, there's been massive changes. We've talked about this many times. What are some of the things, you know, ransomware is a, is, I know as you say, this is a, it's not a, if it's gonna happen, it's when it's how frequent, it's what's gonna be the damage. What are some of the challenges and concerns that you're hearing from customers out there today? >>Yeah, you know, it really comes down to three things. And, and everybody is, is terrified of ransomware and justifiably so. So, so the first thing that comes up is, how do I keep up? Because I have so much data in so many places, and the threats are evolving so quickly. I don't have enough money, I don't have enough people, I don't have enough skilled resources to be able to keep up. The second thing, and this ties in with what Dave said, is, is ecosystem. You know, it used to be that your, your backup was siloed, right? They'd sit in the basement and, and you wouldn't see, see them. But now they're saying, I've gotta work with my security team. So rather than hoping the security team stays away from me, how do I integrate with them? How do I tie together? And then the third one, which is on everybody's mind, is when that attack happens, and like you said, it's win and, and the bell rings and they come to me and they say, all right, it's time for you to recover. It's time for, for all this investment we've put in. Am I gonna be ready? Am I going to be able to execute? Because a ransom or recovery is so different than any other recovery they've ever done. So it's those three things that really are top of mind for >>How, so what is the, what are the key differences, if you could summarize? I mean, I >>Know it's so, so the first one is you can't trust the environment you're restoring into. Even with a disaster, it would finish and you'd say, okay, I'm gonna get my data center set up again and I'm gonna get things working. You know, when I try to recover, I don't know if everything's clean yet. I'm trying to recover while I'm still going through incident response. So that's one big difference. A second big difference is I'm not sure if the thing I'm recovering is good, I've gotta scan it. I've gotta make sure what's inside it is, is, is alright. And then the third thing is what we're seeing is the targets are usually not necessarily the crown jewels because those tend to be more protected. And so they're running into this, I need to recover a massive amount of what we might call tier two, tier three apps that I wasn't ready for because I've always been prepared for that tier one disaster. And so, so those three things they go, it's stuff I'm not prepared or covering. It's a flow. I'm not used to having to check things and I'm not sure where I'm gonna recover too when the, when the time comes. >>Yeah, just go ahead. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think for me, the biggest concern is the blind spots of where did I actually back it up or not. You know, what did I get it? Cuz you, we always protect our e r p, we always protect these sort of classes of tiers of systems, but then it's like, oh, that user's email box didn't get it. Oh, that, you know, that one drive didn't get it. You know, or, or, or whatever it is. You know, the infrastructure behind it all. I forgot to back that up. That to me the blind spots are the scariest part of a ransomware attack. >>And, and if you think about it, some of the most high profile attacks, you know, on the, on the colonial pipeline, they didn't go after the core assets. They went after billing. That's right. But billing brought everything down so they're smart enough to say, right, I'm not gonna take the, the castle head on. Is there is they're that. Exactly. >>And so how do you, I get, I mean you can air gap and do things like that in terms of protecting the, the, the data, the corrupt data. How do you protect the corrupt environment? Like that's, that's a really challenging issue. Is >>It? I don't know. I mean, I'll, I'll you can go second here. I think that what's interesting to me about is that's what cloud's for. You can build as many environments as you want. You only pay for what you use, right? And so you have an opportunity to just reconstruct it. That's why things, everything is code matters. That's why having a cloud partner like Druva matters. So you can just go restore wherever you need to in a totally clean environment. >>So the answer is you gotta do it in the cloud. Yeah. What if it's on prem? >>So if it's on prem, what we see people do is, and, and, and this is where testing and, and where cloud can still be an asset, is you can look and say a lot of those assets I'm running in the data center, I could still recover in the cloud. And so you can go through DR testing and you can start to define what's in your on-prem so that you could make it, you know, so you can make it cloud recoverable. Now, a lot of the people that do that then say, well actually why am I even running this on prem anymore in the first place? I should just move this to the cloud now. But, but, but there are people in that interim step. But, but, but it's really important because you, you're gonna need a clean environment to play in. And it's so hard to have a clean environment set up in a data center cuz it basically means I'm not touching this, I'm just paying for something to sit idle. Whereas cloud, I can spin that up, right? Get a, a cloud foundation suite and, and just again, infrastructures code, spin things up, test it, spin it down. It doesn't cost me money on a daily basis. >>Jason, talk a little bit about how you are using Druva. Why Druva and give us a kind of a landscape of your IT environment with Druva. >>Yeah. You know, so when we first started, you know, we did have a competitor solution and, and, and it was only backing up, you know, we were a startup. It was only backing up our email. And so as you pointed out, the ecosystem really matters because we grew out of email pretty quick as a startup. And we had to have real use cases to protect and the legacy product just wouldn't support us. And so our whole direction, or my direction to my team is back it up wherever it is, you know, go get it. And so we needed somebody in the field, literally in the middle of Nebraska or Iowa to have their laptop backed up. We needed our infrastructure, our data center backed up and we needed our, our SaaS solutions backed up. We needed it all. And so we needed a partner like Druva to help us go get it wherever it's at. >>Talk about the value in, with Druva being cloud native. >>Yeah. To us it's a big deal, right? There's all sorts of products you could go by to go just do endpoint laptop protection or just do SAS backups. For us, the value is in learning one tool and mastering it and then taking it to wherever the data is. To me, we see a lot of value for that because we can have one team focus on one product, get good at it, and drive the value. >>That consolidation theme is big right now, you know, the economic headwinds and so forth. What was the catalyst for you? Was it, is that something you started, you know, years ago? Just it's good practice to do that? What's, >>Well, no, I mean luckily I'm in a very good position as a startup to do define it, you know, but I've been in those legacy organizations where we've got a lot of tech debt and then how do you consolidate your portfolio so that you can gain more value, right? Cause you only get one budget a year, right? And so I'm lucky in, in the learnings I've had in other enterprises to deal with this head on right now as we grow, don't add tech debt, put it in right. Today. >>Talk to us a little bit about the SaaS applications that you're backing up. You know, we, we talk a lot with customers, the shared, the shared responsibility model that a lot of customers aren't aware of. Where are you using that competing solution to protect SaaS applications before driven and talk about Yeah. The, the value in that going, the data protection is our responsibility and not the SA vendor. >>No, absolutely. I mean, and it is funny to go to, you know, it's like Office 365 applications and go to our, our CFO and a leadership and be like, no, we really gotta back it up to a third party. And they're like, but why? >>It's >>In the cloud, right? And so there's a lot of instruction I have to provide to my peers and, and, and my users to help them understand why these things matter. And, and, and it works out really well because we can show value really quick when anything happens. And now we get, I mean, even in SharePoint, people will come to us to restore things when they're fully empowered to do it. But my team's faster. And so we can just get it done for them. And so it's an extra from me, it's an extra SLA or never service level I can provide to my internal customers that, that gives them more faith and trust in my organization. >>How, how are the SEC op teams and the data protection teams, the backup teams, how are they coming together? Is is, is data protection backup just morphing into security? Is it more of an adjacency? What's that dynamic like? >>So I'd say right now, and, and I'll be curious to hear Jason's organization, but certainly what we see broadly is, you know, the, the teams are starting to work together, but I wouldn't say they're merging, right? Because, you know, you think of it in a couple of ways. The first is you've got a production environment and that needs to be secured. And then you've got a protection environment. And that protection environment also has to be secured. So the first conversation for a lot of backup teams is, alright, I need to actually work with the security team to make sure that, that my, my my backup environment, it's air gapped, it's encrypted, it's secured. Then I think the, the then I think you start to see people come together, especially as they go through, say, tabletop exercises for ransomware recovery, where it's, alright, where, where can the backup team add value here? >>Because certainly recovery, that's the basics. But as there log information you can provide, are there detection pieces that you can offer? So, so I think, you know, you start to see a partnership, but, but the reality is, you know, the, the two are still separate, right? Because, you know, my job as a a protection resiliency company is I wanna make sure that when you need your data, it's gonna be there for you. And I certainly want to, to to follow best secure practices and I wanna offer value to the security team, but there's a whole lot of the security ecosystem that I want to plug into. I'm not trying to replace them again. I want to be part of that broader ecosystem. >>So how, how do you guys approach it? Yeah, >>That's interesting. Yeah. So in my organization, we, we are one team and, and not to be too cheesy or you know, whatever, but as Amazon would say, security is job one. And so we treat it as if this is it. And so we never push something into production until we are ready. And ready to us means it's got a security package on it, it's backed up, the users have tested it, we are ready to go. It's not that we're ready just be to provide the service or the thing. It's that we are actually ready to productionize this. And so it's ready for production data and that slows us down in some cases. But that's where DevOps and this idea of just merging everything together into a central, how do we get this done together, has worked out really well for us. So, >>So it's really the DevOps team's responsibility. It's not a separate data protection function. >>Nope. Nope. We have specialists of course, right? Yeah, yeah. Because you need the extra level, the CISSPs and those people Yeah, yeah. To really know what they're doing, but they're just part of the team. Yeah. >>Talk about some of the business outcomes that you're achieving with Druva so far. >>Yeah. The business outcomes for me are, you know, I meet my SLAs that's promising. I can communicate that I feel more secure in the cloud and, and all of my workloads because I can restore it. And, and that to me helps everybody in my organization sleep well, sleep better. We are, we transport a lot of the carbon in a pipeline like Colonial. And so to us, we are, we are potential victims of, of a pipe, a non pipeline group, right? Attacking us, but it's carbon, you know, we're trying to get it outta atmosphere. And so by protecting it, no matter where it is, as long as we've got internet access, we can back it up. That provides tons of value to my team because we have hundreds of people in the field working for us every day who collect data and generate it. >>What would you say to a customer who's maybe on the fence looking at different technologies, why dva? >>You know, I think, you know, do the research in my mind, it'll win if you just do the research, right? I mean, there might be vendors that'll buy you nice dinners or whatever, and those are, those are nice things, but the, the reality is you have to protect your data no matter where it is. If it's in a SaaS application, if it's in a cloud provider, if it's infrastructure, wherever it is, you need it. And if you just go look at the facts, there it is, right? And so I, I'd say be objective. Look at the facts, it'll prove itself. >>Look at the data. There you go. Steven Druva recently announced a data resiliency guarantee with a big whopping financial sum. Talk to us a little bit about that, the value in it for your customers and for prospects, >>Right? So, so basically there's, there's really two parts to this guarantee. The first is, you know, across five different SLAs, and I'll talk about those, you know, if we violate those, the customers can get a payout of up to 10 million, right? So again, putting, putting our money where our mouth is in a pretty large amount. But, but for me, the exciting part, and this is, this is where Jason went, is it's about the SLAs, right? You know, one of Drew's goals is to say, look, we do the job for you, we do the service for you so you can offer that service to your company. And so the SLAs aren't just about ransomware, some of them certainly are, you know, that, that you're going to be able to recover your data in the event of a ransomware attack, that your data won't get exfiltrated as part of a ransomware attack. >>But also things like backup success rates, because as much as recovery matters a lot more than backup, you do need a backup if you're gonna be able to get that recovery done. There's also an SLA to say that, you know, if 10 years down the road you need to recover your data, it's still recoverable, right? So, so that kind of durability piece. And then of course the availability of the service because what's the point of a service if it's not there for you when you need it? And so, so having that breadth of coverage, I think really reflects who Druva is, which is we're doing this job for you, right? We want to make this this service available so you can focus on offering other value inside your business. And >>The insurance underwriters, if they threw holy water on >>That, they, they, they were okay with it. The legal people blessed it, you know, it, you know, the CEO signed off on it, the board of directors. So, you know, it, and it, it's all there in print, it's all there on the web. If you wanna look, you know, make sure, one of the things we wanted to be very clear on is that this isn't just a marketing gimmick that we're, we're putting, that we're putting substance behind it because a lot of these were already in our contracts anyway, because as a SAS vendor, you're signing up for service level agreements anyway. >>Yeah. But most of the service level agreements and SaaS vendors are crap. They're like, you know, hey, you know, if something bad happens, you know, we'll, we'll give you a credit, >>Right? >>For, you know, for when you were down. I mean, it's not, you never get into business impact. I mean, even aws, sorry, I mean, it's true. We're a customer. I read define print, I know what I'm signing up for. But, so that's, >>We read it a lot and we will not, we don't really care about the credits at all. We care about is it their force? Is it a partner? We trust, we fight that every day in our SLAs with our vendors >>In the end, right? I mean this, we are the last line of defense. We are the thing that keeps the business up and running. So if your business, you know, can't get to his data and can't operate, me coming to you and saying, Dave, I've got some credits for you after you, you know, after you declare bankruptcy, it'll be great. Yeah, that's not a win. >>It's no value, >>Not helpful. The goal's gotta be, your business is up and running cuz that's when we're both successful. So, so, so, you know, we view this as we're in it together, right? We wanna make sure your business succeeds. Again, it's not about slight of hand, it's not about, you know, just, just putting fine print in the contract. It's about standing up and delivering. Because if you can't do that, why are we here? Right? The number one thing we hear from our customers is Dr. Just works. And that's the thing I think I'm most proud of is Druva just works. >>So, speaking of Juva, just working, if there's a billboard in Santa Clara near the new offices about Druva, what's, what's the bumper sticker? What's the tagline? >>I, I, I think, I think that's it. I think Druva just works. Keeps your data safe. Simple as that. Safe and secure. Druva works to keep your data safe and secure. >>Saved me. >>Yeah. >>Truva just works. Guys, thanks so much for joining. David, me on the program. Great to have you back on the cube. Thank you. Talking about how you're working together, what Druva is doing to really putting, its its best foot forward. We appreciate your insights and your time. Thank >>You. Thanks guys. It's great to see you guys. Likewise >>The show for our guests and Dave Ante. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cube, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>AWS public sector summit here in person in Washington, D. C. For two days live. Finally a real event. I'm john for your host of the cube. Got a great guest Howard Levinson from data bricks, regional vice president and general manager of the federal team for data bricks. Uh Super unicorn. Is it a decade corn yet? It's uh, not yet public but welcome to the cube. >>I don't know what the next stage after unicorn is, but we're growing rapidly. >>Thank you. Our audience knows David bricks extremely well. Always been on the cube many times. Even back, we were covering them back when big data was big data. Now it's all data everything. So we watched your success. Congratulations. Thank you. Um, so there's no, you know, not a big bridge for us across to see you here at AWS public sector summit. Tell us what's going on inside the data bricks amazon relationship. >>Yeah. It's been a great relationship. You know, when the company got started some number of years ago we got a contract with the government to deliver the data brooks capability and they're classified cloud in amazon's classified cloud. So that was the start of a great federal relationship today. Virtually all of our businesses in AWS and we run in every single AWS environment from commercial cloud to Govcloud to secret top secret environments and we've got customers doing great things and experiencing great results from data bricks and amazon. >>The federal government's the classic, I call migration opportunity. Right? Because I mean, let's face it before the pandemic even five years ago, even 10 years ago. Glacier moving speed slow, slow and they had to get modernized with the pandemic forced really to do it. But you guys have already cleared the runway with your value problems. You've got lake house now you guys are really optimized for the cloud. >>Okay, hardcore. Yeah. We are, we only run in the cloud and we take advantage of every single go fast feature that amazon gives us. But you know john it's The Office of Management and Budget. Did a study a couple of years ago. I think there were 28,000 federal data centers, 28,000 federal data centers. Think about that for a minute and just think about like let's say in each one of those data centers you've got a handful of operational data stores of databases. The federal government is trying to take all of that data and make sense out of it. The first step to making sense out of it is bringing it all together, normalizing it. Fed aerating it and that's exactly what we do. And that's been a real win for our federal clients and it's been a real exciting opportunity to watch people succeed in that >>endeavour. We have another guest on. And she said those data center huggers tree huggers data center huggers, majority of term people won't let go. Yeah. So but they're slowly dying away and moving on to the cloud. So migrations huge. How are you guys migrating with your customers? Give us an example of how it's working. What are some of the use cases? >>So before I do that I want to tell you a quick story. I've I had the luxury of working with the Air Force Chief data officer Ailene vedrine and she is commonly quoted as saying just remember as as airmen it's not your data it's the Air Force's data. So people were data center huggers now their data huggers but all of that data belongs to the government at the end of the day. So how do we help in that? Well think about all this data sitting in all these operational data stores they're getting it's getting updated all the time. But you want to be able to Federated this data together and make some sense out of it. So for like an organization like uh us citizenship and immigration services they had I think 28 different data sources and they want to be able to pull that data basically in real time and bring it into a data lake. Well that means doing a change data capture off of those operational data stores transforming that data and normalizing it so that you can then enjoy it. And we've done that I think they're now up to 70 data sources that are continually ingested into their data lake. And from there they support thousands of users doing analysis and reports for the whole visa processing system for the United States, the whole naturalization environment And their efficiency has gone up I think by their metrics by 24 x. >>Yeah. I mean Sandy carter was just on the cube earlier. She's the Vice president partner ecosystem here at public sector. And I was coming to her that federal game has changed, it used to be hard to get into you know everybody and you navigate the trip wires and all the subtle hints and and the people who are friends and it was like cloak and dagger and so people were locked in on certain things databases and data because now has to be freely available. I know one of the things that you guys are passionate about and this is kind of hard core architectural thing is that you need horizontally scalable data to really make a I work right. Machine learning works when you have data. How far along are these guys in their thinking when you have a customer because we're seeing progress? How far along are we? >>Yeah, we still have a long way to go in the federal government. I mean, I tell everybody, I think the federal government's probably four or five years behind what data bricks top uh clients are doing. But there are clearly people in the federal government that have really ramped it up and are on a par were even exceeding some of the commercial clients, U. S. C. I. S CBP FBI or some of the clients that we work with that are pretty far ahead and I'll say I mentioned a lot about the operational data stores but there's all kinds of data that's coming in at U S. C. I. S. They do these naturalization interviews, those are captured in real text. So now you want to do natural language processing against them, make sure these interviews are of the highest quality control, We want to be able to predict which people are going to show up for interviews based on their geospatial location and the day of the week and other factors the weather perhaps. So they're using all of these data types uh imagery text and structure data all in the Lake House concept to make predictions about how they should run their >>business. So that's a really good point. I was talking with keith brooks earlier directive is development, go to market strategy for AWS public sector. He's been there from the beginning this the 10th year of Govcloud. Right, so we're kind of riffing but the jpl Nasa Jpl, they did production workloads out of the gate. Yeah. Full mission. So now fast forward today. Cloud Native really is available. So like how do you see the the agencies in the government handling Okay. Re platform and I get that but now to do the reef acting where you guys have the Lake House new things can happen with cloud Native technologies, what's the what's the what's the cross over point for that point. >>Yeah, I think our Lake House architecture is really a big breakthrough architecture. It used to be, people would take all of this data, they put it in a Hadoop data lake, they'd end up with a data swamp with really not good control or good data quality. And uh then they would take the data from the data swamp where the data lake and they curate it and go through an E. T. L. Process and put a second copy into their data warehouse. So now you have two copies of the data to governance models. Maybe two versions of the data. A lot to manage. A lot to control with our Lake House architecture. You can put all of that data in the data lake it with our delta format. It comes in a curated way. Uh there's a catalogue associated with the data. So you know what you've got. And now you can literally build an ephemeral data warehouse directly on top of that data and it exists only for the period of time that uh people need it. And so it's cloud Native. It's elastically scalable. It terminates when nobody's using it. We run the whole center for Medicaid Medicare services. The whole Medicaid repository for the United States runs in an ephemeral data warehouse built on Amazon S three. >>You know, that is a huge call out, I want to just unpack that for a second. What you just said to me puts the exclamation point on cloud value because it's not your grandfather's data warehouse, it's like okay we do data warehouse capability but we're using higher level cloud services, whether it's governance stuff for a I to actually make it work at scale for those environments. I mean that that to me is re factoring that's not re platform Ng. Just re platform that's re platform Ng in the cloud and then re factoring capability for on uh new >>advantages. It's really true. And now you know at CMS, they have one copy of the data so they do all of their reporting, they've got a lot of congressional reports that they need to do. But now they're leveraging that same data, not making a copy of it for uh the center for program integrity for fraud. And we know how many billions of dollars worth of fraud exist in the Medicaid system. And now we're applying artificial intelligence and machine learning on entity analytics to really get to the root of those problems. It's a game >>changer. And this is where the efficiency comes in at scale. Because you start to see, I mean we always talk on the cube about like how software is changed the old days you put on the shelf shelf where they called it. Uh that's our generation. And now you got the cloud, you didn't know if something is hot or not until the inventory is like we didn't sell through in the cloud. If you're not performing, you suck basically. So it's not working, >>it's an instant Mhm. >>Report card. So now when you go to the cloud, you think the data lake and uh the lake house what you guys do uh and others like snowflake and were optimized in the cloud, you can't deny it. And then when you compare it to like, okay, so I'm saving you millions and millions if you're just on one thing, never mind the top line opportunities. >>So so john you know, years ago people didn't believe the cloud was going to be what it is. Like pretty much today, the clouds inevitable. It's everywhere. I'm gonna make you another prediction. Um And you can say you heard it here first, the data warehouse is going away. The Lake house is clearly going to replace it. There's no need anymore for two separate copies, there's no need for a proprietary uh storage copy of your data and people want to be able to apply more than sequel to the data. Uh Data warehouses, just restrict. What about an ocean house? >>Yeah. Lake is kind of small. When you think about this lake, Michigan is pretty big now, I think it's I >>think it's going to go bigger than that. I think we're talking about Sky Computer, we've been a cloud computing, we're going to uh and we're going to do that because people aren't gonna put all of their data in one place, they're going to have, it spread across different amazon regions or or or amazon availability zones and you're going to want to share data and you know, we just introduced this delta sharing capability. I don't know if you're familiar with it but it allows you to share data without a sharing server directly from picking up basically the amazon, you RLS and sharing them with different organizations. So you're sharing in place. The data actually isn't moving. You've got great governance and great granularity of the data that you choose to share and data sharing is going to be the next uh >>next break. You know, I really loved the Lake House were fairly sing gateway. I totally see that. So I totally would align with that and say I bet with you on that one. The Sky net Skynet, the Sky computing. >>See you're taking it away man, >>I know Skynet got anything that was computing in the Sky is Skynet that's terminated So but that's real. I mean I think that's a concept where it's like, you know what services and functions does for servers, you don't have a data, >>you've got to be able to connect data, nobody lives in an island. You've got to be able to connect data and more data. We all know more data produces better results. So how do you get more data? You connect to more data sources, >>Howard great to have you on talk about the relationship real quick as we end up here with amazon, What are you guys doing together? How's the partnership? >>Yeah, I mean the partnership with amazon is amazing. We have, we work uh, I think probably 95% of our federal business is running in amazon's cloud today. As I mentioned, john we run across uh, AWS commercial AWS GovCloud secret environment. See to us and you know, we have better integration with amazon services than I'll say some of the amazon services if people want to integrate with glue or kinesis or Sagemaker, a red shift, we have complete integration with all of those and that's really, it's not just a partnership at the sales level. It's a partnership and integration at the engineering level. >>Well, I think I'm really impressed with you guys as a company. I think you're an example of the kind of business model that people might have been afraid of which is being in the cloud, you can have a moat, you have competitive advantage, you can build intellectual property >>and, and john don't forget, it's all based on open source, open data, like almost everything that we've done. We've made available to people, we get 30 million downloads of the data bricks technology just for people that want to use it for free. So no vendor lock in. I think that's really important to most of our federal clients into everybody. >>I've always said competitive advantage scale and choice. Right. That's a data bricks. Howard? Thanks for coming on the key, appreciate it. Thanks again. Alright. Cube coverage here in Washington from face to face physical event were on the ground. Of course, we're also streaming a digital for the hybrid event. This is the cubes coverage of a W. S. Public sector Summit will be right back after this short break.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hi, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE Studios here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here for coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit. This is theCUBE Virtual with our quarantine crew going out and covering the latest posts of the Virtual Summit where our next guest is Matthew Cornelius, Executive Director for the Alliance for Digital Innovation. Matthew, thanks for joining me today for part of AWS virtual Public Sector Summit. >> That's great, thanks, John. Appreciate you having me. >> I know that John Wood and I have been talking about this organization and some of the ambition and the relevance of it. So I think it's a super important story. I want to get your thoughts on this in an unpack kind of the mission but for starters, tell us what is the Alliance for Digital Innovation? When were you formed? What's the mission? What do you do? >> Sure. Yeah, so ADI was formed about two years ago, to create a new advocacy group that could focus explicitly on getting cloud forward, commercial, highly innovative companies into the public sector. So the government technology space has traditionally been dominated by a lot of legacy vendors, folks that are very happy with vendor lock-in, folks that have an outdated business model that would not suffice in the commercial sector. So why does it have to be that way for government and ADI started with about eight members has since grown. We're approaching two dozen now. So we've had a lot of growth and I think a lot of the response that you've seen in the public sector, especially to the COVID crisis, and the response and relief efforts have made this organization and our mission more relevant now than ever. There's no way that you can go back to the previous way of doing business, so adopting all these commercials technologies, changing your business model, changing your operating model, and really use an emerging technology to deliver all these missions services is critical. >> You know, one of the things that I've been reporting on for many, many years is this idea of modernization. Certainly on the commercial side with cloud, it's been really important and Amazon has done extremely well, from a business standpoint. We all know that where that's going. The issue that's happening now is the modernization is kicking in. So the government has started to move down this track, we've seen the procurement start to get more modernized. Move from buying manuals to actually having the modern stuff and in comes COVID-19. You couldn't have accelerated, you couldn't have pulled the future forward fast enough to an already struggling federal government, in my opinion, and I've talked to many people in DC and the young crowd saying, "Hey, old government get modern", and then this comes. It's almost like throwing the rock on your back and you're sinking. This is a problem. What's your take on this? Because you're trying to solve a problem with modernizing, but now you got COVID-19 coming in, it compounds the complexity and the challenge. What's your chosen reaction to that? >> Yeah, so it there's a multifaceted response to this. So part of it is what I like to say is the government's done more in the past four months than it's done in the past 14 years when it comes to modernization and adopting commercial capabilities. I think with individual agencies, you've seen those those agencies, I will name a couple like the Small Business Administration, the General Services Administration, where I used to work, folks that were already heavily invested in cloud, heavily invested in modern digital tools and modern digital processes, they were able to weather this storm and to deal especially in SPS case, with a dramatic increase in their mission. I mean, running the paycheck Protection Program is something unlike an organization that size has ever seen. And from a technology standpoint, they have a lot of good stories that are worth telling and I think it's because they were so cloud forward. I think one of the other interesting points that as really come to light over the past four months is so many of the issues around modernization were cultural. Now, of course, there are some that are legal, there's acquisition, there's the way agencies are appropriated and financed and the way they can spend their money, but by and large, all of these agencies had to move to maximum telework, they had to get rid of all of these outdated on premise processes, these paper based processes that they had. And although surely there were some bumps in the road, and that was not easy, especially for these folks working around the clock to keep their agencies operational to make sure citizens are getting the services, they need, especially during this crisis, I think there's a lot of great success stories that you see there and because of this, no one even if they're allowed to go back into the office or when they're allowed to go back in the office, people are going to understand how much more productive they are, how much more technologically capable they are. And that's not just CIO officers that's people on programs in the front lines delivering services that mission response. We've really seen it powerful word over the last four months. >> You know, Matthew, I've been very vocal given that I'm kind of the old guy, get off my lawn kind of commentary. (Matthew laughs) I've seen that the waves and I remember coming in when I was in my late 20s and 30s old school enterprises, the commercial business wouldn't do business with startups, you had to be approved or you were in entrenched vendors supporting those things and then in comes the web, in comes the 90s, and then the web came there's more agile, you had startups that were more open and working with commercial vendors. It seems like we're seeing that movie play out in public sector where you have the entrenched incumbents, they got the town wired, who knows what's going on. It's been called the Beltway bandits for years and Tris and Curson and I talk about that all the time, but now the government can be agile, and startups need to be product to these new solutions, like whether it's video conferencing or virtual events, things like we do. New solutions are coming that need to come in, it's hard. Can you share how a company whether it's a startup or a new solution can come in and work with the government? Because the perception is, it's impossible. >> Yeah, and part of why ADI exist is to break that down. One to recruit more members to join us to really help drive commercial innovation in the government. And we have some very large companies like AWS and others that do an awful lot of work with the government. And we have a lot of smaller startups that are interested in dipping their toe in there. And so we try to help them demystify how it is that you go about working with the government. I think there have been again, some good success stories on this one. I think that there are lots of places like the Department of Defense, a lot of the folks in the intelligence community, some other agencies, they have authorities, they have partnership programs that make it easier for folks to adopt commercial innovation. They have unique authorities like other transaction authorities or commercial solutions offerings that really lowers the barrier for new technologies to be piloted and potentially scaled inside government. But that's not the case across lots of agencies, and that's why we advocate broadly for getting the acquisition process to move at the speed of technology. If there are good authorities that work in some agencies, let's get into everybody, let's have everybody try it because the people in the agencies, the acquisition professionals, the technical professionals, they have to be committed to working with industry, so the industry is committed to working with them. And as a former federal employee, myself, I worked at the Office of Management and Budget and the General Service Administration, I always was upset at the fact that the government is very good at speaking to industry, but not very good at working with industry and listening, and so we see a lot more of that now and I think part of that is a response to COVID, but it's also the recognition that you can't do things the way you used to do it, the traditional butts in seats contracting business model where everybody in between a federal employee and that outsourced service provider. You don't need all those people there, you can do it yourself and be just as effective and get all the real outcomes you're looking for with commercial innovation. >> It sounds like ADI your priorities is to make things go fast and be modernized. So I have to ask you, the question that's on my mind, probably on everyone's mind is, what are the key conversations or messages you provide to the agencies, heads or members of Congress to get them excited about this, to take action to support what you're doing? Because let's face it, most of these guys up on the Hill are girls now, most of them have a law backgrounds, they don't have a tech background. So that's a complaint that I've heard in the hallways in DC is, the guy making all the decisions doesn't know jack about tech. >> No, it's it's a great point. When we advocate up on the Hill there's a law that I don't think a lot of folks pay in awful lot of attention to. Everybody likes the nice new things that are coming from Capitol Hill but there's a great piece of legislation from 1994 for the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act. We actually did some tremendous original research at ADI, about a year ago and released an interesting report that got a lot of uptick here. And most people don't even understand that the law requires you to do market research and see if there's a commercial product or service that meets your need before you go down building any sort of specific requirements or building out some sort of long procurement process. And so a lot of what we're doing is educating folks, not just on what the law says, but on why these can lead to better outcomes for agencies. I mean, I truly believe that most of the folks in government whether they're technical folks or not want to do the best thing, but if you're a company trying to do business with the government, you have to go through what is often a five or six or sometimes 10 person human supply chain. There's someone in government who wants your solution because it addresses a particular problem, and between them, and you the company, there's all sorts of additional bureaucratic overlays and folks that are not technical, that have other incentives and other priorities that don't always lead to the most optable procurement outcome. So there's an educational component, there's a cultural component. We need more champions inside government. We need not just better technology that's wanting to work with the government but we also need smarter, better people inside that understand the technology and can get to it the way they need to get to it so that they can deliver mission. >> As someone like me who's in the technology business, who loves entrepreneurship, loves business, loves the impact of technology, I'm not a public servant, and I'm not at that up to speed on all the government kind of inside baseball, so I kind of look at it a little bit differently. I've always been a big proponent of public private partnerships that's been kicked around in the past. It's kind of like digital transformation, kind of cliche, but there's been some pockets of success there, but look at the future. The role of influence and the commercial impact just China, for instance, just riffing the other day with someone around China doesn't actually go through government channels for how they deal with the United States. There's a little commercial, they have intellectual property issues going on, people saying they're stealing, they're investing in the United States. So there's a commercial influence. So as the government has to look at these commercial influences, they then have to modernize their workforce, their workloads, their applications, their workplaces. The work is not just workloads, it's workplace, workforce. So if you had your way, how would you like to see the landscape of the federal technology piece of this look like in five years? Because there's now new influence vectors coming in that are outside the channels of federal purview. >> No, it's a great question, and I appreciate you bringing up the other complexities around nation state actors in China and everything else. Obviously, supply chain security and being able to deal with legitimate security threat is critical when you're inside government. I mean, your first sort of purpose is to do no harm and to make sure that you're keeping citizen data, whether it's classified or unclassified secure. We think at ADI that there's a great balance to be heard there and part of that is if you're working with American companies, and you're adopting the best and most agile and most innovative commercial technology that America has to offer, that's going to make our industry more competitive and position it better in the commercial market and it's also going to make government agencies more effective. They're going to be able to meet their mission faster, they're going to be able to lower costs, they're going to be able to shift what are going to be tighter and tighter budgets over the next four or five or 10 years to other areas because they're not wasting so much money on these old systems and this old business processes, this old way of doing business. So you that is one of the balances that we have to take from an advocacy standpoint. We have to understand that supply chain security, cybersecurity are real issues, but security can also be an enabler to innovation and not an impediment and if a lot of the commercial capabilities that are coming out now and a lot of these companies like the ones ADI represents, want to do business with the government, and their commercial products can inherently be more secure than a lot of these old bespoke systems or old business practices. That's good for not just federal agencies, that's good for citizens and that's good for our national defense and our economy. >> You know, I look at our landscape and being an American born here, looking at other emerging countries, certainly China's one example of becoming very world digital native, even other areas where 5G and then telecom has made great internet access, you're seeing digital native countries, so as we modernize, and our lawmakers have more tech savvy and things become digital native, the commercial enabling piece is a huge thing, having that enabling technology, because it creates wealth and jobs and other things so you got three things, digital native country, enabling technologies to promote good and wealth and engine of economic value, and then societal impact. What's your take on those three kind of pillars? Because we're kind of as a country coming into this world order and look at the younger generation, they're all screaming for it, we're digital native, and all kinds of arbitrage there, fake news, misinformation, then you got enabling technology with the cloud, and then you get societal benefits, future of elections and everything else. So what's your thoughts? 'Cause it sounds like you're thinking about these things in your Digital Innovation Alliance. >> Yeah, absolutely. The one thing I will say and as someone that was a former federal employee, the one thing we need more of whether you're on the executive branch or in Congress, we need more people that like you said, are digital natives that understand technology that also want to be inside government either running programs or dealing with policy issues. We need as many good new ideas and folks with real, legitimate, necessary and current skills in there. Because if you don't understand the technology, you don't understand, like you said the societal impacts, you don't understand the business impacts of government decision making and the government can drive markets. I mean, especially in the middle of Coronavirus, we're spending trillions of dollars to keep folks afloat and we're using technology primarily as a way to make that happen. So the first thing I would say is, we need, we continue, need to continue, sorry, we need to continue to recruit and retain and train the best and the brightest to go into government service because it is a joy and a privilege to serve government and we've got to have better smarter technical people in there or we're going to keep getting these same outcomes, like you've mentioned over the past 30 plus years. >> I think we're in a JFK moment where John F. Kennedy said, "Ask not what your country can do for you, "what you can do for your country". Moment in the modern era and that was the 60s, that we saw the revolution of that happen there, we're kind of having a digital version of that now where it's an opportunity for people to get involved, younger generations and make change rather than arguing about it. So I feel fairly strongly about this so I think this is an opportunity. Your reaction to that? >> No, that's a fantastic point. I hadn't really thought about the JFK resemblance. From an industry standpoint, I think that is what is happening with these emerging technology companies and even some of the large companies. They understand that this is their way to contribute to the country whose R&D dollars and these public private partnerships helped a lot of these folks to grow and become the companies they are now. At least started them down that road. And so for us at the Alliance for Digital Innovation and the companies that are a part of us that is sort of purposeful to who we are. We do what we do and we want the government to build stronger relationships and to use this technology, because it does serve mission. I mean, we exclusively focus on the public sector. Focus of these companies and it's tremendously valuable when you see a federal agency who spent five or 10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars and still not solving a problem and then they can pick up the commercial off the shelf technology from a company that we represent, and can solve that problem for $5 million and do it in six months. I mean, that's truly rewarding and whether you're inside government or out, we should all celebrate that and we should find ways to make that the norm and not the exception. >> And take all that hate and violence and challenge it towards voting and getting involved. I'm a big proponent of that. Matthew, thank you so much for taking the time. I'll give you the last word. Take a minute to put a plug in for the Alliance for Digital Innovation. Who are the charter members, who's involved? I know John Wood from Telos is a charter member. Who's involved, how did it all start? >> Yeah. >> Give it taste of the culture and who's involved. >> Yeah, thanks, John. So, yeah, like you mentioned, we have tremendous members, AWS is obviously a great partner. We have a lot of big companies that are involved, Google Cloud, Salesforce, Palantir, Palo Alto Networks. We also have great midsize and small companies. You think of Telos, you think of SAP NS2 and Iron Net, you think of Saildrone. We've got companies that whose technology product and service offerings run the range for government needs. We all come together because we understand that the government can and should and must do better to buy and leverage commercial technology to meet mission outcomes. So that is what we focus on. And, frankly, we have seen tremendous growth since COVID started. I mean, we are 24 members now we were at 18, just four months ago, but I like to say that ADI is an organization whose mission is more important and more resonant now, not just in the technology, parts of government, but at the secretary level at the Chief Acquisition Officer level, in Congress. We are folks that are trying to paint the future, we're doing a positive vision for change for what government can and should be. And for all of those other technology companies that want to be a part of that, that understand that the government can do better, and that has ideas for making it work better and for getting commercial innovation into government faster, to solve mission outcomes and to increase that trust between citizens and government, we want you. So if folks are interested in joining you got people that are watching out there, you can go to alliance4digitalinnovation.org. We're always accepting interested applicants and we look forward to continuing this message, showing some real outcomes and helping the government for the next year, five years, 10 years, really mature and modernize faster and more effectively than it has before. >> Great mission, love what you're doing. I think the future democracy depends on these new models to be explored, candidly and out in the open, and it's a great mission, we support that. Thanks for taking the time, Matthew. Appreciate it. >> Thanks, John. Have a great Public Sector Summit. >> Okay, this is theCUBE coverage of AWS Public Sector Virtual Summit. I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE Virtual. Thanks for watching and stay tuned for more coverage. (gentle music)