(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here in Paolo Alto, California but during COVID, we're doin' all the remote interviews and gettin' the stories and celebrating the awards for the Partner Awards Show. And the award here is most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal area. We've got two great guests, Greg Siegel Senior Manager at Accenture and Frank Urbano Program Manager with the FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me and congratulations on the win. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So let's break this down. So you're federal, big category, a lot of intelligence agencies been using the gov cloud and Amazon. What's the mission win? What's the award for? Tell us. >> So I guess the award is the Bureau was shutting down our data centers and we needed to move to an infrastructure that would support our application. That was the first problem that we were trying to actually solve. But also, we know we were always seeing a performance hit on our infrastructure, and we always suspected that by moving to the gov cloud, we'll see an increase in performance because once we went live in our current, in or old environment seven years ago, performance was always an issue, our end users were always complaining and then we moved to our VMs four years after that. We saw an increase in performance a little bit but then once we moved over to the cloud, the FBI secret cloud, we heard crickets. The end users haven't been complaining. Greg and I were actually talking about that the other day how, you know, there's minimal complaints as far as performance. That's going to be one of the themes you hear throughout is performance, performance, performance. >> Got to love the no complaints, that means it's workin', people are doin' their job, gettin' the job done. Greg, I want to get your thoughts on this because Accenture, we've had many conversations with you guys over there about being agile and now you're a partner. You know, the FBI, I saw a presentation in person at Reinvent, I think last year where the FBI was like, "Lookit, our workloads "are increasing and budget isn't increasing "at the same rate." So it's kind of like, you know, "I need more power." It's like that scene in Star Trek, "Scotty, more power," you need to get that power. Take us through that transformation because one, you got a good user experience. That means people are doin' their job. But the cases get bigger, the more workload is there, but the budget's got to be increased or leveraged better. What's your thoughts? How do you tackle that problem because it's do more with less, classic do more with less. >> That's right. Yeah, so as Frank said, I think the system had been live for about seven years and you see over that time in the traditional data centers how the performance requirements increase but as you said, are kind of there on hardware and not easily able to adapt and overcome those. So, you know, when it became clear that the cloud move was a serious consideration we were able to pull on a few other experiences that the firm has had moving similar technologies to the cloud and then kind of combined that with the experience implementing technology at the FBI. And those two components kind of together were able to get us on a path to successfully move to the cloud and be, you know, kind of one of the first big systems at the FBI to make that transition. So that was our approach. >> Frank, I'd like to ask, you mentioned crickets. That means, that's good, actually. No one's complaining. What was it like before when you had the data center? What were some of the complaints? What were some of the challenges that you were dealing with? >> So (chuckling) so some of the challenges we were dealing with was, to give an example, when we went live seven years ago, we actually deployed our application on hardware that was already end of life. And so immediately we saw challenges there. And so by moving to the cloud, it gave us a lot of architectural flexibility. And what I mean by that is that we control, now, our own destiny, meaning that in the past, we would have to put in change requests to have firewall configuration changes. Now that responsibility is with us. Our DBAs had limited access to actually do some type of performance tuning on the backend to our databases. Now we have full control of that. I guess a couple of examples, or one example that I would give is that we're in the COVID era, as you mentioned, right? We have a space where we, prior to COVID, we had about 70 people on staff, both government and at Accenture. And all of our development is done on the secret side. And we have major deliverables due at the end of September. Well, COVID hits, we now have to social distance and come up with a plan, and we have to have reduce our staff of 70, both functional developers down to anywhere between 10 people or less on-site. So that, right there, you know, we were talking major hit in our development effort and in cost, I guess, also. While we're doing our social distancing plan Greg came up to me and said, "Hey, why don't we move "our development environment and our test environment "to the gov cloud and scramble the data. "We'll be able to have our developers remote access in "and continue with our development efforts?" And I told Greg, "Great, put a plan together. "Let's talk to our information security officer." I said, "If he signs off on it, let's get off and running." We met with him, he signed off on them, and within two weeks that dev and test environment was up and running. And now, we're still on-track to meet our deliverable dates in September. >> That's a great example, well, that's awesome insight. Greg, expand on that because this is an example of agility. You talk about readiness, I mean it's unforecasted disruption, there's all kinds of use cases. "Oh, we have a hurricane," or whatever, you know. This is unforeseen and unique. Take us through-- >> Yeah, that's absolutely right. >> The agility piece here, on how you got deployed, time frame, and solution. >> Yeah, definitely. So yeah, it can't be overstated how much of a benefit it was that we had already gone through the process of refactoring a lot of our applications into the cloud and using some of those services available and, you know, able to containerize and take some of those application from where they were, as Frank mentioned, scramble the data, and then able to quickly use the cloud experience that we had to stand up an environment in gov cloud where it was more accessible for development that didn't need to take place on-site, was, essentially, the saving grace. We would have had major slowdowns in delivery, as Frank mentioned and a lot of cost implications there, so it really can't be overstated how much that experience having gone through it and being in a spot where we had that flexibility to quickly replicate our architecture, went a long way towards keeping the mission going as the world deals with the pandemic. >> Yeah, this is just a striking example. You know, first of all, I'm a cloud-biased person. I'm very much a, I lean heavily towards pro-cloud so I'll just say this as total bias. There are companies that have gone cloud and took advantage of that refactoring or reinvention and are in a position not only to hit the deadlines but also be in a position of growth strategy, or in this case, a mission-based expansion for the FBI, as Frank was alluding to. Could you imagine, Frank, if you had the data center challenge and you weren't in the cloud? And the you had to go to Greg, or somebody, and say, "Hey, what do you do?" So imagine you had the data center, and then COVID hits. A lot of people are on that side of the street, right now, goin', "What do we do?" >> Yeah, yeah we would have been dead in the water as Greg mentioned. You know, all of our work streams would have been forced out to the left. I couldn't even imagine, you know, the timelines that we would have had to come up with because we would have had to have come up with some rotation plan to develop, you know, team one can only come in on Mondays and Tuesdays and then team two would come in on Wednesdays and Thursdays which would have pushed out our delivery dates and as Greg mentioned also, cost goes up. Time is money, money's time. >> Yeah, I totally, and people goin' out of business because of it and, or settin' their mission back you know, decades. Greg, talk about what goes on next because obviously, congratulations on being a customer success, it's a great mission win here, but you got to get through this. So how are you guys huddling on this point? What are the conversations? What are you thinking? >> Yeah, so now we're at a point where I think, as I'd mentioned, when we first moved to the cloud, the primary mission was getting there securely, getting there within policy, and getting operational so we were making trade-off decisions on where to lift and shift, and where to refactor. Got through all of that successfully. Got through the initial challenge of COVID which definitely threw some of the plans for a loop as we shifted our operations and focused on getting operational in gov cloud. And now we are at a point where we've stabilized delivery again, and we're re-picking up where we left off on the cloud journey which is really focused now, on continuing to look at the investments that AWS is making in the technologies that are coming next. And it really enables us to get ahead of the trends, easily analyze some of these services, available, and then we enter into conversations with Frank and others and start making those trade-off decisions of when it's time to refactor, retire another part of our application and start to look to go cloud-native. So that's where we are now, is looking for ways to maximize and use those services to, again, save costs, improve performance, all of those things that go along with getting more and more mature in the cloud. >> You know, one of the things, Frank, I want to hear your thoughts on just as while I got you guys here is you think about old school, old guard, as Andy Jassy would say, or Teresa talk about. You got silos and you got all these things: legacy. Okay, got that. But as you guys look at your mission have secure data, catch the bad guys, and protect citizens, right? So (chuckling) I mean, I'm over-simplifying but generally, that's it. Data's critical, right? I mean, speed to the edge of the network which is the field and the people doing the job, is critical. Cloud has an opportunity to make that development cycle faster, and ultimately, the workloads and the impact. Could you share your thoughts on how the cloud and Amazon are bringin' that to the table because havin' the right data at the right time could mean the difference between life or death. >> Yeah, so Greg and I experienced this, and again, it's all about having that architectural flexibility, right? So back in February, we had a requirement where we had to expose a large amount of data to employees about themselves, but not only about themselves, but also to their managers. And so, you know, we went through the basic you know, develop it, and then put it into our test environment, however the problem that we had was that we couldn't assimilate the large amount of data that we're exposing to 40,000 FBI employees. Because when we tested out, everything seemed to go fine, but as luck would have it, once we went operational, the application crashed. Our two main engineers come in my office and within 30 minutes, they identified the problem, they had the solution, and we already implemented the solution. Within 30 minutes. You know, going back in the past, like seven years, like you were mentioning, back in the old days, I would have to go around, beg for funding, buy hardware, then I would have to submit a requisition. It would have to go through the approval process. We then would have to procure the hardware, receive the hardware, install it, test it out, load the application, test it again, and then go into Ops. You know, you're lookin' anywhere from a three month to a nine month delay right then and there that our engineers were able to solve within 30 minutes. >> I mean, again, I'm back to my bias again. I'm old enough to remember when I was in college. I mean, I never programmed on punch cards, so that's kind of dates me, (chuckling) but so I'm post punch card generation. I used to look at the guys runnin' the mainframes sayin', "Look at those old relics over there," and "huggin' the mainframe." But what they did was that the smart people repurposed and got into mini-computers, they got into networking, LANs and PCs. This is kind of the cloud moment where if you're going to hold onto that old way you're going to have that operating model, it's just not effective in any way. I just don't see any benefit, other than have a preserved workload that needs the certain data, or you put containers around it and you can bring that in, but there are those corner cases. But generally speaking, you got to move to the new model. >> Mm-hmm. >> Guys, react to that. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah. >> Evermore. Yeah. >> Yeah, I agree, I mean It can't really be overstated, just the flexibility that exists. I think a lot of times, people get hung up on the you know, most efficient way to move to the cloud or you have to use X amount of cloud services. But it can't be overstated, regardless of the approach that you take to making that migration, that once you are there, the kind of intangibles that you get, the ease to take an idea and test it out, flip the switch on, flip the switch off if you like it or not. It's really just opened the door for the team to take some of the more innovative ideas and we have regular conversations with Frank and others that I think are fun for all of us where we get to look at some of these things and we can actually think about and envision how to get them in without, to Frank's point, "putting in requisitions," doing major activities that are going to derail our other schedules to pilot some of these new ideas. >> Frank, you got to attract some, it's a personnel challenge, too. You want to attract young minds, smart, young people. They want what's contemporary and they want state-of-the-art, they want to be in the right positions, drivin' the right, fastest car they can, and being successful. There's a staff component. What's your thoughts on that? Because, you know, if a young person comes in it's like, "Hey, I want to rock and roll with this new stuff, "not the old stuff I see there." >> Right. >> And so Greg put together an innovation team where we have these great, young minds, right? And you know, they're always bringing different ideas, different services that we can utilize on AWS, and sometimes Greg and I have to pull the reins on 'em, like, "Okay, we'll do that, but we have "major applications that we got to develop and deploy." But it's always refreshing and great to see young people with their innovative ideas that they bring to the table. >> Well, final question for you guys, while I got ya here. You know, I've been reporting, we've been saying on these CUBE interviews, trying to make sense of this COVID environment, what's goin' on and what it exposes. And you can see the obvious things. But it generally exposes this great IoT experiment. We're all IoT devices at this point. You've got work places which are not home and office, workforces which are remote, workloads and workflows that are changing, new things are happening. How do you guys see this? Because it ultimately opens up the fact that the architecture has to support multiple endpoints, edge of the network, new connections, new workflows. How are you guys looking at this? What's your vision on this? >> So Greg, I'll take a first crack at it from a Bureau employee being with the Bureau for 31 years. I would never have thought in my wildest dreams that we'd actually have people workin' from home and being able to remote in, and actually do development. And we did it all within two weeks. It's just incredible the obstacles that the team overcome, but also the flexibility of the FBI leadership, knowing that this had to happen in order to, for continuity of operations. >> Great point, great insight. Greg, your thoughts. >> Yeah, I agree with everything that Frank said. It's been a great partnership and I think that the nice thing that surprised us all was when it got down to it, the security controls and requirements were there and able to be met with the tools at our disposal. So I think the great fear that everybody had to Frank's point, it just wasn't something that was normal to this point. But as we were all forced to reevaluate what we had to do, the fear was, "Well, what accommodations are we "going to have to make from a security standpoint?" And the answer was being able to operate again without exposing any of that data, the risk was really extremely low, to zero. All the folks from security we're able to work closely with in partnership, and make this happen again so we can keep delivering the mission. So I think that partnership and getting through it together and all feeling really comfortable that we're doing it in a secure way was really what enabled us to be successful. >> That's a great point. Frank, he brings up something I didn't bring up which is super important. You mentioned in the old way you got to get all these requisitions in purchase. Security is the same kind of new dynamic which is like, "Okay, you got to get "everything tested," but it goes faster when you have the cloud 'cause that's also another criteria, you got to still got to get the approvals whether you're working with another vendor or integrating with another app. That's still now the new issue. So that's got to be approved faster, so that's also now a bottleneck. How does cloud help make those security reviews go faster? >> Right, so so we were the first ones on the cloud. So or security team was still defining the ATO process for us. However, what we did was we aligned ourselves with that team so that we could meet all the security requirements, but also app out all the security controls. And so from the time that we actually had the design till we went into deployment onto the SC2S or the cloud, and we went through the ATO process, it only took us eight months which really, in the past, that effort could have took anywhere from a year and a half to two years just because of the old ATO process. >> Awesome. Well, Greg and Frank, congratulations on a great award, Amazon Public Sector Partner Awards Show, most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal category. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft electronic melody music)

>> From around the globe it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hello everyone. Welcome to the special CUBE coverage Of AWS Partner Awards Show. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here in our Palo Alto, California studio doing the remote interviews with our quarantine crew. Obviously during this time of COVID we're remote with the best Remote Work Solution Award for AWS Partner Awards goes to Tyler Technologies and the City of Alvin Municipal Court, and we have Sandy Peters, Vice President General Manager of Virtual Courts, an Incode court system. Sandy is here to talk about that and Sonya Cates, who's the City of Alvin's Municipal Court Court Administrator. Welcome and congratulations for the Best Remote Work Solution. We're remote! Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> (chuckles) Thanks, John, thanks. >> Okay so Sandy I'll start with you. Tyler Technologies, you're the General Manager of the Incode Court. This is a solution that you're deploying with the city of Alvin to do some things. Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing together, what does your group at Tyler do and how is it working with City of Alvin? >> Yeah John, Tyler Technologies is just completely focused on local, state and federal government software and services and particularly, the Incode court application focuses on municipal court, which is what Sonya is the Court Administrator for in Alvin. We have about 900 clients across the US that do that same thing. We had this idea about coming up with a remote solution for ability for someone to, instead of having to go to court to see a judge that they could do that remotely and really have the same experience and so we sort of launched off on that and worked with several different of our clients and came up with a way for that to happen. Sonya got involved in it very early on and has been instrumental in helping us continue to make it successful. >> Sonya, talk about the City of Alvin's municipal court system. Obviously with COVID people are sheltering in place and they're not moving around much. You have to have a solution. Talk about the partnership with Tyler. How did this come together, how do you guys work? Take us through that. >> Well we have a great relationship with Tyler Technologies. They are very instrumental in our day-to-day processing. They sent out an email with the idea, due to COVID, and soon as we received the email we decided that was the best solution for our court and we just immediately jumped on board with it so we could resolve cases and not get behind. >> So the Virtual Court means, okay, I get a ticket, I want to appeal it, normally I'd show up and now I can't so it interfaces it? Take me through the solution and where does AWS fit into all this? I'm assuming it's on the cloud. >> It definitely is on the cloud, John, and that's exactly right. So if you get a citation, sometimes you may want to appeal it; sometimes you just want to find out what your options are and you are going to go appear before a judge. You can do that remotely now through our application. It supports all the video, you can upload documents, exchange those supporting documents and then it interfaces with our case management system so that, as changes are made on the case, they're reflected and the defendant can see those and so it just, really, the whole idea is remotely being able to go before the judge, find out what your options are go through that process, and then at the very end it gives them a way to completely take care of that case and within a few minutes it can be completely resolved. >> Sonya take us through the City of Alvin's court system there. What's the challenges that you have and what was some of the feedback when you first brought this out? Take us through what happened. >> Well, to be honest, for us it was unknown territory. We were a little nervous, we were a little scared to do something of this sort but with the situation at hand we had to figure out something and this was the best fit for us. There was other options available but we prefer to stay within Tyler and utilize the system to its fullest so that's why we just said, "Okay, let's do this." I have a judge that's amazing that is very tech savvy and he was on board and my city manager. So just working with Tyler each step of the way and them comforting us, in a sense, to let us know, "Hey it's okay. "We're here each step of the way. "We'll build this together," and that's kind of where we started with the whole project. >> So this is a low-hanging fruit, obviously. It's not jury, I'm assuming. Not a jury kind of situation. It's more of other, non-jury activities, right? >> Right. It's the day-to-day court, you know, non-jury. We're not doing any jury trials right now until after the governor allows us. So it's just the regular, you know, pre-trials, the attorney dockets, arraignments and those sorts of cases. >> I'd love to be on the planning sessions as you start to roll out the software for jury selection. We'll go into that- >> I'm excited, I'm ready. >> Kind of like, what's your Facebook handle look like? (laughs) >> Yeah. >> You know, it's going to be digital surveillance. I don't know, could be crazy. But this is the future. This is what we're talking about here. This is all cloud scale. One of the benefits of cloud is taking things and doing experiments. We hear that all the time. Take us through the judge. So you said he's tech savvy. Are these like Zoom-like calls, is there a workflow? I'm just trying to envision what stood up in terms of the Incode Virtual Court side, Sandy. Sonya, what's it like? Take me through the experience. >> Well everything's tied in together, whereas Zoom and other options out there, it's separated from your software. So that was one of the perks of going through Tyler with this Virtual Court is because everything's tied into one. We don't have to enter data or anything. After the docket's over it's all live. Our forms, as soon as the defendant and the judge make an agreement, it's put into TCM where the defendant can see it live, sign the orders and immediately get it back to us and there's no delay time, there's no down time, and it's housed in one. So we're not having to miss data or, you know, it eliminates a lot of errors, clerical errors or cases from being missed. >> And the judge handles everything, right? He deals with the personal interactions, reviews the data, the defendant makes their case? >> Well (crosstalk), the clerics do a lot, too. He's talking, and as he's talking, we're entering his orders as he's speaking. >> So it's real-time- >> So we're interacting. >> This is true agility. Sandy, this is the future. This is where the solutions start to get the scale. So what's next? What is the vision? How do you guys see the next step because we all know that COVID will be over soon, we hope faster than it's happened, but it'll be a hybrid world and I think this shows a template for efficiencies. >> Right. Yes, yeah, I think that's a great point and it is the future. We're going to continue to leverage our relationship with AWS which has just been incredible through this process and went way beyond what we were expecting just in terms of resources and helping us even just within our own development processes, as we brought something to scale and in learning how to load test and really build applications that can scale out. So we believe it is the future and Sonya makes a great point many times because they live in an area where, sometimes, there's other natural disasters, like hurricanes, that can disrupt what's going on for them. But then, also, as you just think about, really, what I would call responsibility. As we move forward, we have a responsibility to provide ways that people can take care of things and not put themselves at risk as we move into the future, past COVID. So we're going to continue to leverage the technology that AWS provides, the scalability, how we can load test and everything and it was really a no-brainer for us to run this application on the AWS services for us. >> And Sonya, it's also not just about justice, not only getting the folks who are speeding and taking care of the penalties there, but it's also potentially for justice. If someone is not guilty or they want to get... business has to continue, right? So this extends into the use case of remote, hybrid, the future, because- >> Oh yes. >> Work can be distributed. Now you have efficiencies. This is going to create a connected system, which ultimately can be a connected community. >> Yeah, and it's going to reduce the failure to appear for court cases, also, so that'll be less warrants, more compliance, and it's a better relationship between us, the court, and our defendants, because they have the option of not having to leave work or miss appointments. You know, they can still tend to their case and do other things that they need to do without taking and spending, you know, couple of hours sitting in a room at the court. >> That's a huge point, Sandy. This is about resource utilization on both sides; not just the courts and the City of Alvin, on the municipal side, the citizens. It's efficiency. I mean how many people don't show up because they can't get out of work or they need to make their paycheck or they have their family needs need to be met. So all these things play into the psychology (chuckles) of life. This is digital life, virtualization of life. It really is a big thing. >> Yeah, yeah. I think you're exactly right, I mean, you're hitting on some great points. That's exactly right and when you think about what has to happen for you to go and maybe go before a judge and take off work, you got to go fight traffic, you got to find parking, you may have to have someone that takes care of your children. There's all sorts of things you're having to go through just to get down and be in front of a judge that this can help with and I think it's just one aspect, to your point, of really trying to think of really starting to help government think about how to be more customer centric, how to provide some ways for people to take care of what they need to take care of. So we're really trying, and your point about connected communities is a huge key point for us at Tyler, as we think of ways that we can help a community be more connected, for sure. >> Well you know I'm huge into whole civic relationships and having a productive government and having citizens be served for that reason and having it be a community, and now more than ever, transparency is helpful, right? This only helps things. So you guys are doing a really great job of, one, enabling a work environment remotely, in this case, it's for the courts to be operational, which they need to be, but it clearly can extend. So Sonya, I've got to ask you the question. I'd love to get your commentary on surprises when you rolled this out. You know, were people like, "Oh my god, no one's ever going to use it," or, "It's just too techie," or has there been any pleasant surprises or things that surprised you that you didn't think was going to happen? Give us some kind of commentary on some observations that you've seen from rolling out the Best Remote Work Solution. >> It's been very interesting. Our actual first defendant, he was elderly, and so we were kind of concerned. Okay, will he know how to connect and he did amazing. So that's kind of where we knew if we could reach the older generation and he can connect, all these younger defendants and younger people shouldn't have any issue. So we explained to him, "Hey, you're our first defendant. "This is new to us, it's new to you," and he did awesome. So that kind of gave us the confidence we needed to pursue it even more and push it out there and give the defendants options. There's been, we've looked (chuckles)... Some people forget, and so do I, that we're on camera and, you know (John laughs), we can see up noses, they forget they're in their vehicle, you know, it may hit a few bumps. >> John: There are dogs barking in the back (laughs). >> You know like, okay, maybe we need to pull over. (laughs) So it's been an experience but a pleasant experience and it gave us... We didn't want to backlog cases throughout this COVID and having the virtual option through Tyler has, we were, when COVID first started, we got behind, until we launched, we had about 800 cases we got behind on, and then soon as we launched out Virtual Court, now we're caught up, my court's running smooth, everything's great and there's no backlog of cases. >> Clear the backlog. The question I want to ask is that elderly first user. Did he or she get an early adopter discount on the sentence? (laughs) >> The judge was kind. (laughs) But he did awesome, I was shocked. >> I kind of resent the elderly remark, Sonya, but that's okay. (laughs) I think she's referring to me. >> No, no, no. He was in his 80s. >> Okay, I feel a little, I feel young, then. Well you guys, congratulations. I'd like to get your parting thoughts just with cloud technology. A lot of other folks out there are looking at re-imagining public service, specifically around these times where there's a lot of emotional stress, like, you got backlogged, you don't want to have the court get backlogged. I can see that. People don't want tickets hanging out there. But that kind of encapsulates people's feelings right now and I think remote citizenship is coming. Just your thoughts on how you see this as a beginning, starting point for cloud computing enabling the efficiencies, the solutions and the applications for a more connected community experience. Sonya, we'll start with you. >> Okay. I can see this, this is the way we're going to keep things. We like the option, the flexibility that our defendants, our citizens have. It's opened our eyes, and if there's other courts out there that are kind of hesitant to go ahead and jump in and do it, I strongly recommend just do it. It's scary in the very beginning because a lot of us were not used to it, but after you get through it and you go through the changes, it's so worth it in the end and you'll see such a... More of a compliance for both sides and, you know, it reduces the stress on staff having to send out mail notices for failure to appears and stuff of that sort. Reduce warrants. So it's been a win-win all the way around. So if I could reach any court out there that's kind of on the line of doing it, just do it. >> All right, yeah, great. Sandy. >> Yeah, and John, for us, cloud is the future. I mean every application we have, we're actively working, if it's not already a cloud-based solution, it will be and we're a huge believer in the scalability. But when you look at applications like this, as an example, of Tyler Virtual Court, where it's really a win-win situation. It's better for the court; they can continue to carry on their business; it's better for the citizen because now they can actually take care of something that they weren't going to be able to take care of in the past, and as we continue to find win-win solutions, cloud-based solutions are going to be at the core of that in terms of just how easy it is to access and roll out. So it's a big part of our future and we believe it's a big part of our customers' future, as well. >> Well congratulations. Modernization has positive impacts if done right. More time is freed up to work on maybe personal things and connect those communities and bring people together. Congratulations, Tyler Technologies and the City of Alvin for the Best Remote Work Solution and it's the court system. Get those tickets paid, clear that backlog and now you got all the time in the world, Sonya, to kind of work on other things. What do you do with all your free time? >> I'm going to take a vacation! (laughs) >> Thank you so much for having this conversation and, again, congratulations. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thanks a lot, John, thank you. >> Okay this is the CUBE's covering of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show. I'm John Furrier with the Best Remote Work Solution. Thanks for watching. (futuristic marimba music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here in Paolo Alto, California but during COVID, we're doin' all the remote interviews and gettin' the stories and celebrating the awards for the Partner Awards Show. And the award here is most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal area. We've got two great guests, Greg Siegel Senior Manager at Accenture and Frank Urbano Program Manager with the FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me and congratulations on the win. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So let's break this down. So you're federal, big category, a lot of intelligence agencies been using the gov cloud and Amazon. What's the mission win? What's the award for? Tell us. >> So I guess the award is the Bureau was shutting down our data centers and we needed to move to an infrastructure that would support our application. That was the first problem that we were trying to actually solve. But also, we know we were always seeing a performance hit on our infrastructure, and we always suspected that by moving to the gov cloud, we'll see an increase in performance because once we went live in our current, in or old environment seven years ago, performance was always an issue, our end users were always complaining and then we moved to our VMs four years after that. We saw an increase in performance a little bit but then once we moved over to the cloud, the FBI secret cloud, we heard crickets. The end users haven't been complaining. Greg and I were actually talking about that the other day how, you know, there's minimal complaints as far as performance. That's going to be one of the themes you hear throughout is performance, performance, performance. >> Got to love the no complaints, that means it's workin', people are doin' their job, gettin' the job done. Greg, I want to get your thoughts on this because Accenture, we've had many conversations with you guys over there about being agile and now you're a partner. You know, the FBI, I saw a presentation in person at Reinvent, I think last year where the FBI was like, "Lookit, our workloads "are increasing and budget isn't increasing "at the same rate." So it's kind of like, you know, "I need more power." It's like that scene in Star Trek, "Scotty, more power," you need to get that power. Take us through that transformation because one, you got a good user experience. That means people are doin' their job. But the cases get bigger, the more workload is there, but the budget's got to be increased or leveraged better. What's your thoughts? How do you tackle that problem because it's do more with less, classic do more with less. >> That's right. Yeah, so as Frank said, I think the system had been live for about seven years and you see over that time in the traditional data centers how the performance requirements increase but as you said, are kind of there on hardware and not easily able to adapt and overcome those. So, you know, when it became clear that the cloud move was a serious consideration we were able to pull on a few other experiences that the firm has had moving similar technologies to the cloud and then kind of combined that with the experience implementing technology at the FBI. And those two components kind of together were able to get us on a path to successfully move to the cloud and be, you know, kind of one of the first big systems at the FBI to make that transition. So that was our approach. >> Frank, I'd like to ask, you mentioned crickets. That means, that's good, actually. No one's complaining. What was it like before when you had the data center? What were some of the complaints? What were some of the challenges that you were dealing with? >> So (chuckling) so some of the challenges we were dealing with was, to give an example, when we went live seven years ago, we actually deployed our application on hardware that was already end of life. And so immediately we saw challenges there. And so by moving to the cloud, it gave us a lot of architectural flexibility. And what I mean by that is that we control, now, our own destiny, meaning that in the past, we would have to put in change requests to have firewall configuration changes. Now that responsibility is with us. Our DBAs had limited access to actually do some type of performance tuning on the backend to our databases. Now we have full control of that. I guess a couple of examples, or one example that I would give is that we're in the COVID era, as you mentioned, right? We have a space where we, prior to COVID, we had about 70 people on staff, both government and at Accenture. And all of our development is done on the secret side. And we have major deliverables due at the end of September. Well, COVID hits, we now have to social distance and come up with a plan, and we have to have reduce our staff of 70, both functional developers down to anywhere between 10 people or less on-site. So that, right there, you know, we were talking major hit in our development effort and in cost, I guess, also. While we're doing our social distancing plan Greg came up to me and said, "Hey, why don't we move "our development environment and our test environment "to the gov cloud and scramble the data. "We'll be able to have our developers remote access in "and continue with our development efforts?" And I told Greg, "Great, put a plan together. "Let's talk to our information security officer." I said, "If he signs off on it, let's get off and running." We met with him, he signed off on them, and within two weeks that dev and test environment was up and running. And now, we're still on-track to meet our deliverable dates in September. >> That's a great example, well, that's awesome insight. Greg, expand on that because this is an example of agility. You talk about readiness, I mean it's unforecasted disruption, there's all kinds of use cases. "Oh, we have a hurricane," or whatever, you know. This is unforeseen and unique. Take us through-- >> Yeah, that's absolutely right. >> The agility piece here, on how you got deployed, time frame, and solution. >> Yeah, definitely. So yeah, it can't be overstated how much of a benefit it was that we had already gone through the process of refactoring a lot of our applications into the cloud and using some of those services available and, you know, able to containerize and take some of those application from where they were, as Frank mentioned, scramble the data, and then able to quickly use the cloud experience that we had to stand up an environment in gov cloud where it was more accessible for development that didn't need to take place on-site, was, essentially, the saving grace. We would have had major slowdowns in delivery, as Frank mentioned and a lot of cost implications there, so it really can't be overstated how much that experience having gone through it and being in a spot where we had that flexibility to quickly replicate our architecture, went a long way towards keeping the mission going as the world deals with the pandemic. >> Yeah, this is just a striking example. You know, first of all, I'm a cloud-biased person. I'm very much a, I lean heavily towards pro-cloud so I'll just say this as total bias. There are companies that have gone cloud and took advantage of that refactoring or reinvention and are in a position not only to hit the deadlines but also be in a position of growth strategy, or in this case, a mission-based expansion for the FBI, as Frank was alluding to. Could you imagine, Frank, if you had the data center challenge and you weren't in the cloud? And the you had to go to Greg, or somebody, and say, "Hey, what do you do?" So imagine you had the data center, and then COVID hits. A lot of people are on that side of the street, right now, goin', "What do we do?" >> Yeah, yeah we would have been dead in the water as Greg mentioned. You know, all of our work streams would have been forced out to the left. I couldn't even imagine, you know, the timelines that we would have had to come up with because we would have had to have come up with some rotation plan to develop, you know, team one can only come in on Mondays and Tuesdays and then team two would come in on Wednesdays and Thursdays which would have pushed out our delivery dates and as Greg mentioned also, cost goes up. Time is money, money's time. >> Yeah, I totally, and people goin' out of business because of it and, or settin' their mission back you know, decades. Greg, talk about what goes on next because obviously, congratulations on being a customer success, it's a great mission win here, but you got to get through this. So how are you guys huddling on this point? What are the conversations? What are you thinking? >> Yeah, so now we're at a point where I think, as I'd mentioned, when we first moved to the cloud, the primary mission was getting there securely, getting there within policy, and getting operational so we were making trade-off decisions on where to lift and shift, and where to refactor. Got through all of that successfully. Got through the initial challenge of COVID which definitely threw some of the plans for a loop as we shifted our operations and focused on getting operational in gov cloud. And now we are at a point where we've stabilized delivery again, and we're re-picking up where we left off on the cloud journey which is really focused now, on continuing to look at the investments that AWS is making in the technologies that are coming next. And it really enables us to get ahead of the trends, easily analyze some of these services, available, and then we enter into conversations with Frank and others and start making those trade-off decisions of when it's time to refactor, retire another part of our application and start to look to go cloud-native. So that's where we are now, is looking for ways to maximize and use those services to, again, save costs, improve performance, all of those things that go along with getting more and more mature in the cloud. >> You know, one of the things, Frank, I want to hear your thoughts on just as while I got you guys here is you think about old school, old guard, as Andy Jassy would say, or Teresa talk about. You got silos and you got all these things: legacy. Okay, got that. But as you guys look at your mission have secure data, catch the bad guys, and protect citizens, right? So (chuckling) I mean, I'm over-simplifying but generally, that's it. Data's critical, right? I mean, speed to the edge of the network which is the field and the people doing the job, is critical. Cloud has an opportunity to make that development cycle faster, and ultimately, the workloads and the impact. Could you share your thoughts on how the cloud and Amazon are bringin' that to the table because havin' the right data at the right time could mean the difference between life or death. >> Yeah, so Greg and I experienced this, and again, it's all about having that architectural flexibility, right? So back in February, we had a requirement where we had to expose a large amount of data to employees about themselves, but not only about themselves, but also to their managers. And so, you know, we went through the basic you know, develop it, and then put it into our test environment, however the problem that we had was that we couldn't assimilate the large amount of data that we're exposing to 40,000 FBI employees. Because when we tested out, everything seemed to go fine, but as luck would have it, once we went operational, the application crashed. Our two main engineers come in my office and within 30 minutes, they identified the problem, they had the solution, and we already implemented the solution. Within 30 minutes. You know, going back in the past, like seven years, like you were mentioning, back in the old days, I would have to go around, beg for funding, buy hardware, then I would have to submit a requisition. It would have to go through the approval process. We then would have to procure the hardware, receive the hardware, install it, test it out, load the application, test it again, and then go into Ops. You know, you're lookin' anywhere from a three month to a nine month delay right then and there that our engineers were able to solve within 30 minutes. >> I mean, again, I'm back to my bias again. I'm old enough to remember when I was in college. I mean, I never programmed on punch cards, so that's kind of dates me, (chuckling) but so I'm post punch card generation. I used to look at the guys runnin' the mainframes sayin', "Look at those old relics over there," and "huggin' the mainframe." But what they did was that the smart people repurposed and got into mini-computers, they got into networking, LANs and PCs. This is kind of the cloud moment where if you're going to hold onto that old way you're going to have that operating model, it's just not effective in any way. I just don't see any benefit, other than have a preserved workload that needs the certain data, or you put containers around it and you can bring that in, but there are those corner cases. But generally speaking, you got to move to the new model. >> Mm-hmm. >> Guys, react to that. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah. >> Evermore. Yeah. >> Yeah, I agree, I mean It can't really be overstated, just the flexibility that exists. I think a lot of times, people get hung up on the you know, most efficient way to move to the cloud or you have to use X amount of cloud services. But it can't be overstated, regardless of the approach that you take to making that migration, that once you are there, the kind of intangibles that you get, the ease to take an idea and test it out, flip the switch on, flip the switch off if you like it or not. It's really just opened the door for the team to take some of the more innovative ideas and we have regular conversations with Frank and others that I think are fun for all of us where we get to look at some of these things and we can actually think about and envision how to get them in without, to Frank's point, "putting in requisitions," doing major activities that are going to derail our other schedules to pilot some of these new ideas. >> Frank, you got to attract some, it's a personnel challenge, too. You want to attract young minds, smart, young people. They want what's contemporary and they want state-of-the-art, they want to be in the right positions, drivin' the right, fastest car they can, and being successful. There's a staff component. What's your thoughts on that? Because, you know, if a young person comes in it's like, "Hey, I want to rock and roll with this new stuff, "not the old stuff I see there." >> Right. >> And so Greg put together an innovation team where we have these great, young minds, right? And you know, they're always bringing different ideas, different services that we can utilize on AWS, and sometimes Greg and I have to pull the reins on 'em, like, "Okay, we'll do that, but we have "major applications that we got to develop and deploy." But it's always refreshing and great to see young people with their innovative ideas that they bring to the table. >> Well, final question for you guys, while I got ya here. You know, I've been reporting, we've been saying on these CUBE interviews, trying to make sense of this COVID environment, what's goin' on and what it exposes. And you can see the obvious things. But it generally exposes this great IoT experiment. We're all IoT devices at this point. You've got work places which are not home and office, workforces which are remote, workloads and workflows that are changing, new things are happening. How do you guys see this? Because it ultimately opens up the fact that the architecture has to support multiple endpoints, edge of the network, new connections, new workflows. How are you guys looking at this? What's your vision on this? >> So Greg, I'll take a first crack at it from a Bureau employee being with the Bureau for 31 years. I would never have thought in my wildest dreams that we'd actually have people workin' from home and being able to remote in, and actually do development. And we did it all within two weeks. It's just incredible the obstacles that the team overcome, but also the flexibility of the FBI leadership, knowing that this had to happen in order to, for continuity of operations. >> Great point, great insight. Greg, your thoughts. >> Yeah, I agree with everything that Frank said. It's been a great partnership and I think that the nice thing that surprised us all was when it got down to it, the security controls and requirements were there and able to be met with the tools at our disposal. So I think the great fear that everybody had to Frank's point, it just wasn't something that was normal to this point. But as we were all forced to reevaluate what we had to do, the fear was, "Well, what accommodations are we "going to have to make from a security standpoint?" And the answer was being able to operate again without exposing any of that data, the risk was really extremely low, to zero. All the folks from security we're able to work closely with in partnership, and make this happen again so we can keep delivering the mission. So I think that partnership and getting through it together and all feeling really comfortable that we're doing it in a secure way was really what enabled us to be successful. >> That's a great point. Frank, he brings up something I didn't bring up which is super important. You mentioned in the old way you got to get all these requisitions in purchase. Security is the same kind of new dynamic which is like, "Okay, you got to get "everything tested," but it goes faster when you have the cloud 'cause that's also another criteria, you got to still got to get the approvals whether you're working with another vendor or integrating with another app. That's still now the new issue. So that's got to be approved faster, so that's also now a bottleneck. How does cloud help make those security reviews go faster? >> Right, so so we were the first ones on the cloud. So or security team was still defining the ATO process for us. However, what we did was we aligned ourselves with that team so that we could meet all the security requirements, but also app out all the security controls. And so from the time that we actually had the design till we went into deployment onto the SC2S or the cloud, and we went through the ATO process, it only took us eight months which really, in the past, that effort could have took anywhere from a year and a half to two years just because of the old ATO process. >> Awesome. Well, Greg and Frank, congratulations on a great award, Amazon Public Sector Partner Awards Show, most customer-obsessed mission-based win in the federal category. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Show, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft electronic melody music)