>> 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, and welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman. This is theCUBE coverage of the AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. We going to be talking about the Customer Obsession Mission award winner. So happy to welcome to the program. First of all, welcoming back Joel Lipkin. He is the chief operating officer of Four Points Technologies, which is the winner of the aforementioned award and joining him one of his customers, Ryan Hillard, who is a assistant developer with the United States, Small Business Administration, and of course the SBA, an organization that a lot of people in the United States have gotten more familiar with this year. Joel and Ryan, thanks so much for joining us. >> Hi Stu? >> Hey Stu; Thank you. >> All right, so Ryan, I'm sorry, Joel, as I mentioned, you've been on the program, but maybe just give us a sketch if you would, Four Points, your role, your partnership with AWS. >> Sure, I'm Joel Lipkin. I'm the chief operating officer at Four Points Technology, Four Points is a value added technology reseller focused on the federal government and we've been working with federal customer since 2002. We're a service disabled veteran owned small business, and we've been in a Amazon partner since 2012. >> Wonderful; Ryan, if you could, obviously, as I mentioned, the SBA, a lot of people know for the PPP in 2020, if you could tell us a little bit about your role in your organization and tee up for us, if you would, the project that Four Points was involved with that you worked on. >> Sure; so I worked for the chief information officer and I don't have this official title, but I am the de facto manager of our Amazon Web Services presence. This year, we've had a very exciting time with what's been happening in the world, the Paycheck Protection Program, and the SBA have been kind of leveraged to help the US economy recover in the face of the pandemic. And a key part of that has been using Amazon Web Services and our partnership with Four Points Technology to launch new applications to address those requirements. >> Wonderful; Joel, maybe a connect for us. How long has Four Points been working with the SBA and start to give us a little bit more about the projects that you're working together, which I understand was predated the COVID incidents. >> Sure; we've been with SBA for several years now. And SBA was one of the earlier federal agencies that really saw the value in separating their procurement for cloud capacity, from the development implementation and managed services that they either did internally or use third party contractors for. So, Four Points came in as a true value added reseller of cloud to SBA providing cloud capacity and also Amazon professionals services. >> All right; so Ryan bring us in a little bit, the project that we're talking about here, what was the challenge? What were the goals you were looking to accomplish? Help flush out a little bit, what you're doing there? >> Yeah, so most recently Four Points partnered with us to deliver Lender Gateway. Lender Gateway is an application for small community oriented lenders to submit Paycheck Protection loans. So some of these lenders don't have giant established IT departments like big banks do, and they needed an easier way to help their customers. We built that application in six days and I called the Four Points cloud manager on a Saturday, and I said, help, help, I need two accounts by three o'clock and Four Points was there for us. We got new accounts set up. We were able to build the application and deploy it literally in a week and meet the requirements set for us. And that system has now moved billions of dollars of loans. I don't know the exact amount, but has done an incredible amount of work and it wouldn't have been possible without our partnership with Four Points. So we're really excited about that. >> Yeah, If I could drill in there for a second. Absolutely it's been an unprecedented, how fast that amount of money move through the legislature to out to the end user. Help us understand a little bit, how much were you using AWS technologies and solutions that Four Points had helped you with, and how much of this was kind of a net new, you said you built a new application, you had to activate some things fast, help us understand a little bit more. >> Yeah, that's so that's a great question. So we have five major systems in AWS today. And so we're very comfortable with AWS service offerings. What's interesting about Lender Gateway is that it's the first application we've built from scratch in a totally serverless capacity. So one of the hard technical requirements of the Paycheck Protection Program is that, it has huge amounts of demand. So when we're launching a system, we need to know that that system will not go down no matter how much traffic it receives or how many requests it has to handle. So we leaned on services like AWS Lambda, S3, dynamoDB, all of their serverless offerings to make sure that under no circumstances could this application fail. And it never did. We never even actually saw a performance degradation. So a massive success from my perspective as the program manager. >> well, that's wonderful. Joel, of course, you talk about scalability, you talk about uptime. Those are really the promise the public cloud has brought. Ryan did a good job of teeing out some of the services from AWS, but help us understand architecturally how you help put that together, and, the various pieces underneath. >> Yes Stu, it's interesting. Four Points is really focused on delivering capacity. Our delivery model is very much built around giving our customers like Ryan full control over their cloud environments so that they can use it as transparently as though they were working with Amazon directly. They have access to all of the 200+ services that AWS has. They also have a direct access to billing and usage information that lets them really optimize things. So this is sort of a perfect example of how well that works because SBA and Ryan knew their requirements better than anyone. And they were able to leverage exactly the right AWS tools without having to apply to use them. It was as though they were working directly with AWS and the AWS environment on the technology side. And I will say SBA has been really a leader in using of variety of AWS services beyond standard compute and storage, not just in a tested environment, but in a live very, very robust, really large environment. >> Yeah, right, and I was excited to hear about your Lambda usage, how you're building with the serverless architecture there. Could you just bring us through a little bit, how you ramped up on that, any tools or community solutions that you were leveraging to make sure you understood that and any lessons you learned along the way as you were building that application and rolling it out? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So I think one of the mistakes that I see program managers make all the time is thinking that they can migrate a workload to the cloud and keep it architecturally the same way it was. And what they quickly find out is that their old architecture that ran in their on premise data center might actually be more expensive in the cloud than it was in their data center. And so when you're thinking about migrating a workload, you really need to come in with the assumption that you will actually be redesigning that workload and building the system in cloud native technology. You know, the concept of Lambda is so powerful, but it didn't exist for, you know, it didn't exist 20 years ago when some of these systems and applications were being written and now being able to leverage Lambda to only use exactly the compute you need, means you can literally pay pennies on the dollar. One of the interesting things about the PPP program and everything happening in the world is that our main website, sba.gov is now serving a a hundred or a thousand times more traffic daily than it was used to doing. But because we lean on serverless technology like Lambda, we have scaled non-linearly in terms of costs. So we're only paying like two or three times more than we used to pay per month, but we're doing a hundred or a thousand times more work. That's a win, that's a huge victory for cloud technology, in my opinion. >> Yeah, and on that point, I think the other thing that SBA did really amazingly well was take advantage of first reserved instances. But I think it was the day that Amazon announced savings plans as a cost control mechanism. Ryan and SBA were on them. They were our first customer to use savings plans. And I think there were probably the first customer in the federal space to use them. So it's not just using the technology smart, it's using the cost control tools really well also. >> Yeah, so Stu, I wanted to jump in here just because I'm so glad Joel brought that up. I was describing how workloads need to morph and transform as they move from legacy setups into more cloud native ones. Well, we were the first federal agency to buy savings plans. And for folks who don't know savings plans essentially make your reserved instances fungible across services. So if you had a workload that was running on EC2 before, now instead of buying a reserved instance at a certain instant size, a certain family, you can instead buy a savings plan. And when your workload is ready to be moved from EC2 to something a little bit more containerized or cloud native, like Fargate or Lambda, then you don't actually forego your reserved instance. I see program managers get into this weird spot where they bought reserved instances, so they feel like they need to use them for a whole year. So they don't upgrade their system until their reserved instances expire. And that's really the tail wagging the dog. We were very excited about savings plans. I think we bought them four days after they came out and they have enabled us to do things like, be very ambitious with how we rethink our systems and how we rebuild them. And I'm so glad you brought that up to all because it's been such a key thing over this last year. >> Yeah, it's been a really interesting discussion point I've been having the last few years, is that the role between developers and that, that finance piece. So, Ryan, who is it that advises you on this? Is there somebody on the finance team from the SBA? is it Four Points? You know, being aware of savings plan, it was something that was announced at Reinvent, but it takes a while for that to trickle and oftentimes developers don't need to think about or think that they don't need to think about the financial implications of how they're architecting things. So how, how does that communication and decision making happen? >> That's such a great question. I think it goes back to how Four Points is customer obsessed. One of our favorite things about using a small business reseller like Four Points instead of dealing directly with our cloud service provider is that Four Points provides us a service where every quarter they do an independent assessment of our systems, how much we're spending and what that looks like from a service breakdown. And then we get that perspective and that opinion, and we enrich it with our conversation with our AWS account manager, with our finance people. But having that third party independent person come in and say, "Hey, this is what we think" has been so powerful because Joel and Dana and team have always had observations that nobody else has had. And those kinds of insights are nice to have, when you have people who are suspicious of a vendor telling you to buy more things with them, because they're the vendor >> From the lessons you've learned there, any final advice that you'd give to your peers out there, and how will you take what you've learned working on this project to other things, either in the SBA or in talking with your peers in other organizations. >> So I have two big things. So one is go use a small business reseller. I would be remiss if I didn't use this opportunity to tell you as a member of the US Small Business Administration, that there are some really, really great service providers out there. They are part of our programs like Four Points, and they can help you achieve that balance between trusting your cloud service provider and having that a third party entity that can come in and, call bowl and also call Yahtzee. So recognize good things and recognize bad things. So that would be number one. And then number two is moving to the cloud is so often sold as a technology project. And it's like 20% technology and 80% culture and workforce change. And so be honest with yourselves and your executive teams that this isn't a technology project. This is, we going to change how we do business project, and we going to change the culture of this organization kind of project. >> All right; and Joel, I'll let you have the final word on lessons learned here and also about Four Points and congratulations again, the Customer Obsession Mission award winner. >> Great, thanks Stu, we're so appreciative to Amazon for their recognition and to Ryan and SBA for giving us the opportunity to support such an important program. We are a small business, we are very much focused on delivering what our customers need in the cloud. And it's just such a tremendous feeling to be able to work on a program like this that has such, such payoff for the whole country. >> All right, Well, Joel and Ryan, thank you so much for sharing your updates, such an important project this year. Thanks so much. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thanks >> Stay with us for more covered from the AWS Public Sector Partner awards. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE.

(upbeat music) >> Live in Washington, DC. This is day two of two days of coverage. I'm John Furr, your host. We're in person face-to-face event it's kicking off day two. Dave Levy's here, Vice President of US government Nonprofit and healthcare businesses for AWS Public Sector. Dave, great to see you again, welcome back. >> Dave: Great to see you, John. >> So, great time last time we were in person, 2019, looks like the event, the last year was virtual, what's new? >> Well, first of all, I think it's just exciting. I mean, I'm excited to be back and in-person and so much has happened in our personal lives in our communities and so I'm really glad that we can all be together and it's been great so far. >> I was talking yesterday with some folks and I saw people doing some networking. I heard someone, "Hey, I'm want to hire someone." So, the face-to-face is back, we're also streaming. Max Peterson told me they're pushing it everywhere on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, everywhere, Twitch, so free content, but still a lot of registrations here in person, good stuff. >> Yeah, great registrations. We're thrilled with the support from partners and customers. And also too, like you said, the connections that people are making, so it does feel good that things are flowing and people are having conversations and- >> Well, you got healthcare, nonprofits, US government, healthcare has been a big focus so far in this show. A lot of action, local governments, governments and healthcare seem to be like pandemic enabled to change. What's the update? What's the highlights so far for you? >> Well, I think the highlights are in those areas that, what we've been able to help our customers with is the ability to respond and that's what Cloud is all about and their ability to react and to respond to things that they don't necessarily know is going to happen and the big thing that none of us knew was going to happen was the pandemic. And so that ability and agility and preparedness to respond has really been great to see from a lot of those customers. >> You know, Max Peterson had the CIO from the Air Force up on stage and she's known for her comments about data and data's our data, the US Air Force and so data's big part of it. They are having a transformation and the how's that project going? What's the update there? What's your impression on that? >> Yeah, well, it was great to see the Air Force on stage and great to see Laura up there and we're really proud to support the DOD and the Air Force. And the Air Force has a lot to be proud of in their transformation journey and what they're doing with Cloud One is pretty substantial and amazing transformation for them. And then they've got 35 applications running on AWS. And so we think their progress is really good and they're thinking the right way in terms of their software factories and other types of projects. >> What's interesting is it's watching like who's adopting, it's like you look at like the pandemic has really opened up the view of the projects, which ones are doing well. And how do I say this politely? The projects that were being blocked or hidden, or the KPIs camouflaging the value were exposed because I mean, once that pulled back the curtain, people realized, "Oh my God, we're stuck," Or "we're inadequate, we are antiquated. We need to change," because now the pressure to deliver shifted to digital. I mean, this literally exposed the good, bad, and the ugly. >> It did and some were more prepared than others. There are great examples. We worked with the SBA to help expand the portal for the payroll protection program to get more lenders access faster. And that was a great project. They were able to respond really quickly and we were able to support them in that. Others, not so much. I think it you're right, it did expose that there's an opportunity. There's an opportunity to accelerate some of the things that they were doing already in terms of digital transformation. >> How about the GovCloud and the federal customers that you have, what's the traction point? How has that going? Is there a new generation here? >> GovCloud has been a great success. GovCloud it's our- >> John: 10-year anniversary. >> It's our 10-year anniversary, so we're thrilled to celebrate that. I can't believe it's 2011. >> EC2 is 15. Is that 315? I guess 15, too is SQS, the original building blocks. >> So, we've got a lot of great success through GovCloud and GovCloud was really something that was born out of what customers wanted, primarily federal customers. But we've also seen over the last few years, real adoption from regulated industry, real adoption from partners that are going into GovCloud that really want to take advantage of the security and compliance that federal customers need and the larger defense industrial base organizations need. So, GovCloud's been a fabulous success and expect I expect a lot of growth going forward. >> Yeah, is there a cultural shift in the federal government now? I can imagine some countries have been exploring this. I did talk briefly about it with Ms. Shannon Kellogg and John Wood, about how, if you're under the age of 40 and you work in the federal government, you got to be like, "Why aren't we doing this?" Like there seems to be like a cultural shift, younger generation coming in and be like, looking at the old way and be like, "Why are we still doing that?" >> Well, I think look bipartisan support for digital transformation, for making sure that we have the competitive edge for generations and generations to come in the US both in business and in defense and national security, I think is an imperative. I mean nobody I've talked to disagrees that we need to do this. And I think that younger workforce coming in behind I'm jealous of the 40-year olds, I wish I was under 40, but none of workforce really sees the obstacles that maybe previous generation saw these emerging technologies are becoming, the basic unit of computer's getting smaller, the cost to do these things is coming way down and I think that younger workforce says, "Why aren't we doing this?" >> Yeah and I think the Air Force projects are interesting too because that shows us not just about the CIA or the DOD that you have, they're leaning into production workloads, and the mission critical workloads too, the DOD is also now continuing to adopt. What else are you guys doing with the DOD? >> Well, we're partnering with GDIT on milCloud and that's going to give DOD mission owners access to a whole suite of AWS services. So, we're really excited about that. And those are available now. We're the only Cloud provider that's making that accessible to them on milCloud. And so this is going to open up the opportunity for them to start doing that mission work that you described. A good example of that are programs like ABMS, Air Force's Advanced Battle Management System. It's part of their effort around JADC2 and a great set of capabilities that they're delivering there. We're happy to have participated. We did some testing and some show intel, if you will at Ramstein Air Force Base and we're really proud to support that effort and we're excited about what the Air Force is doing. >> You know, I've always been impressed with the DOD when the tactical edge concept came out, that was very impressive because they're really using the data properly and I know Amazon has been doing well in this area because you've got things like Outpost, Wavelength, Snowball products. How's that edge piece developing? Do you see that becoming more critical now? >> It's absolutely critical. It's not becoming critical, it is critical and I think if you look at what the DOD and all of their partners are trying to accomplish, it's really moving all of that data around from the very edge in theater, back home to where it needs to be analyzed, doing it fast, doing it secure, being able to deliver on their missions and that's what this is all about. So, we see huge, huge opportunities to really innovate around the edge. >> Yeah, the data equation really is fascinating to me. Just when you think about things like words, highly available versus high availability means something 'cause you're going to want real time, not just on available data, you got to have it real time so the pressure around these projects are high. And so technically, you've got to have low latency on all this stuff. >> That's true, that's true. You've got to either have near real time or real-time availability and in many cases there's high stakes. So, the ability the DOD to pull this off is really, really important and we're a big supporter of that. >> Dave, I want to get your perspective because you've been in the industry, you've seen that the ways, we talked before cameras about the '90s and data centers and stuff. 10 years of GovCloud, look at public sector, just to look at the 10 years, interesting evolution. I mean, you couldn't give Cloud a wait 15 years ago. They weren't moving, glacier speed of adoption, now, massive adoption, uptakes there, the transformations are happening, migrations are huge, healthcare, which is like silo the data, HIPAA compliance lock everything down, everything's opening up. This is causing a lot of change. What's your reaction to that? >> Well, my reaction to that is I think customers are starting to connect what their outcomes are, whether it's a business outcome or a mission outcome or both to what Cloud can actually do. And I think that's freeing them up to make decisions about enabling Cloud in their environment, enabling experimentation, because that's what you want. You don't know what you're going to be faced with. We don't know what the threats are. We don't know if there's going to be another major pandemic. We hope there's not, but we don't know and if you set goals around your outcomes for mission and tie those, Cloud becomes such an enabler for that. And I see customers embracing that. Customers across the spectrum, nonprofit, healthcare providers, everybody, Homeland Security, VA, they're all thinking about, "What are the mission outcomes we're trying to drive?" >> Yeah, what's interesting too on that is that, just to point out is that the applications now aren't as complex to build relatively to the speed. In other words, you can get the time to value. So, the pandemic showed people that if you were in the Cloud and had that agility or optionality to be agile, you could write software 'cause software is the key in this, and not let's do the waterfall, 12-weeks assessment, 10-month rollout. Now people are doing it in 10 days, new applications. >> Sure, sure. Well, I tell customers a lot, "Think about McDonald's during the pandemic and think about customers like that who had to react to a new environment of delivery and your fast food fresh and how quickly companies like that are able to roll out capabilities." And I don't know that federal customers will be able to do it in a week or two weeks, but it's certainly possible. And it certainly will shorten that lead time that they have now in their software development. >> Well, great to see you, Dave. Is there any customers you want to highlight and you want to talk about, get a plug in for? >> Yeah, a lot of great customers here representing today and we're really appreciative also just want to say it was really great to see Max on stage for his first summit and think it was great to see Laura and others as well too. We've got some great customers coming here, The Veteran's affairs is going to be here as well as the Navy presenting on a lot of their capabilities today. So, I'm really excited about that. >> Yeah, a lot of action and education, healthcare, really blooming, really changing and modernizing. Big-wave migration, modernization, all kinds of the big wave. >> Yeah, it is. Yeah, big things coming and some of these systems are ready, so these systems are 40 and 50 years old and we're here to help these customers deliver on the agility and the extensibility of these systems to really serve citizens. >> What's your outlook for next year? What are you seeing next year so happening? How do you see everything unfolding? So you mentioned the pandemic, we're still in it, Delta Virus, who knows what's going to happen next, the world stage is changing, the global economy, space. >> I see customers really leaning in and starting to see the benefits of moving their data to the Cloud, number one, and then also to getting the insights using AI and ML to really drive the insights that they need to make the decisions on that data and I see more and more customers doing that. I did a panel this week, moderated a panel with some great customers around that and getting started is probably the biggest thing that I see and we're going to have more and more customers getting started. >> Yeah, getting into the Cloud. Congratulations to milCloud by the way, too. That was a good call out. All right, thanks for coming, I appreciate it. >> John: Yeah, thanks, Sean. >> Okay, keep coverage here. The Public Sector Summit, live in Washington, D.C. in-person event also hybrid we're streaming out. We're doing remote interviews and Amazon is streaming all the keynotes and key sessions for the digital folks out there. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(high intensity music) >> Everyone, welcome back to theCube coverage of AWS, Amazon Web Services, Public Sector Summit live in D.C. We're in-person, I'm John Furrier, the host of theCube. I'm here with Max Peterson, the Head of Public Sector, Vice President. Max, great to see you in in-person event. >> Great to be here. We're in-person and we're also live streaming. So, we're here, however customers, however partners want to participate. >> I got to say, I'm very impressed with the turnout. The attendance is strong. People excited to be here. We're not wearing our masks cause we're on stage right now, but great turnout. But it's a hybrid event. >> It is. >> You've got engagement here physically, but also digitally as well with theCube and other live streams everywhere. You're putting it everywhere. >> It's been a great event so far. We did a pre-day yesterday. We had great participation, great results. It was about imagining education. And then today, from the executive track to the main tent, to all of the learning, live streaming 'em, doing things in person. Some things just don't translate. So, they'll won't be available, but many things will be available for viewing later as well. So all of the breakout sessions. >> The asynchronous consumption, obviously, the new normal, but I got to say, I was just on a break. I was just walking around. I heard someone, two people talking, just cause I over walk pass them, over hear 'em, "Yeah, we're going to hire this person." That's the kind of hallway conversations that you get. You got the programs, you got people together. It's hard to do that when you're on a virtual events. >> Max: It's hard. The customers that we had up on stage today, the same sort of spontaneity and the same sort of energy that you get from being in-person, it's hard to replicate. Lisa from State of Utah, did a great job and she got an opportunity to thank the team back home who drove so much of the innovation and she did it spontaneously and live. You know, it's a great motivator for everybody. And then Lauren from Air force was phenomenal. And Suchi, our "Imagine Me and You" artist was just dynamite. >> I want to unpack some of that, but I want to just say, it's been a really change of a year for you guys at Public Sector. Obviously, the pandemic has changed the landscape of Public Sector. It's made it almost like Public-Private Sector. It's like, it seems like it's all coming together. Incredible business performance on your end. A lot of change, a lot of great stuff. >> We had customers we talked today with SBA, with VA, with NASA, about how they just embraced the challenge and embraced digital and then drove amazing things out onto AWS. From the VA, we heard that they took tele-health consultations. Get this from 25,000 a month to 45,000 a day using AWS and the Cloud. We heard SBA talk about how they were able to turn around the unemployment benefits programs, you know, for the unemployed, as a result of the traumatic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in a matter of weeks. And then, scaled their systems up just to unbelievable heights as President Biden announced the news. >> You had a lot of announcement. I want to get to a couple of them. One of them was the health equity thing. What is that about? Take us through that announcement. >> So the pandemic, it was hard. It was traumatic in a lot of different ways. It also turned into this little innovation laboratory, but one of the things that it laid bare more than anything else where the inequities associated with some of these systems that had to spring into action. And in particular, in the space of health, healthcare equity. We saw simply communities that didn't have access and weren't included in the same sorts of responses that the rest of the community may have been included in. And so we launched this global initiative today to power health equity solutions. It's a $40 million program. Lasts for three years. And it's open to customers or it's open to partners. Anybody who can contribute to three different areas of health equity. It's people who are leveraging data to build more equal, more sustainable health systems. Is people that are using analytics to do greater study of socioeconomic and social situational conditions that contribute to health inequities. And then finally, it's about building systems that deliver more equitable care to those who are underserved around the world. >> So, just to get this right, 40 million. Is that going to go towards the program for three years and are you going to dolo that out or as funding, or is that just a fund the organization? >> It's actually very similar to the development diagnostic initiative that we ran when COVID hit. We've launched the program. We're welcoming applications from anybody who is participating in those three developmental areas. They'll get Cloud credits. They'll get technical consulting. They may need professional services. They'll get all manner of assistance. And all you have to do is put in an application between now and November 15th for the first year. >> That's for the health equity? >> For the health equity. >> Got it. Okay, cool. So, what's the other news? You guys had some baseline data, got a lot of rave reviews from ACORE. I interviewed Constance and Thompson on the Cube earlier. That's impressive. You guys really making a lot of change. >> Well, you're hundred percent right. Sustainability is a key issue from all of our customers around the world. It's a key issue for us, frankly, as inhabitants of planet earth, right? >> John: Yeah. >> But what's really interesting is we've now got governments around the world who are starting to evaluate whether they're not their vendors have the same values and sustainability. And so that the AWS or the Amazon Climate Pledge is a game changer in terms of going carbon zero by 2040, 10 years ahead of most sort of other programs of record. And then with ACORE, we announced the ability to actually start effecting sustainability in particular parts around the world. This one's aim at that. >> But the key there is that, from what I understand is that, you guys are saying a baseline on the data. So, that's an Amazonian kind of cultural thing, right? Like you got to measure, you can't know what you're doing. >> The world is full of good intentions, but if you want to drive change at scale, you've got to figure out a way to measure the change. And then you've got to set aggressive goals for yourself. >> That's really smart. Congratulations! That's a good move. Real quick on the announcement at re:Invent, you've talked about last re:Invent, you're going to train 29 million people. Where are you on that goal? >> Well, John, we've been making tremendous progress and I'm going to use theCube here to make a small teaser. You know, stay tuned for our re:Invent conference that comes up shortly because we're actually going to be sharing some more information about it. But we've done digital trainings, self-training, online skills workshops. We just took a program called re/Start, which serves an unemployed or underemployed individuals. We launched that around the world and we're really excited. Today, we announced we're bringing it to Latin America too. So we're expanding into Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, and Argentina. And the amazing thing about that re/Start program, it's a 12 week intensive program. Doesn't require skills in advance. And after 12 weeks, 90% of the people graduating from that course go right onto a job interview. And that's the real goal, not just skills, but getting people in jobs. >> Yeah. The thing about the Cloud. I keep on banging the drum. I feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, but the level up, you don't need to have a pedigree from some big fancy school. The Cloud, you can be like top tier talent from anywhere. >> And you heard it from some of our speakers today who said they literally helped their teams bootstrap up from old skills like COBOL, you know, to new skills, like Cloud. And I will tell you, you know, right now, Cloud skills are still in a critical shortage. Our customers tell us all the time they can use every single person we can get to 'em. >> I'm going to tell my son, who's a sophomore in CS. I'm like, "Hey, work on COBOL Migration to AWS. You'll be a zillionaire." (John and Max laughs) No one knows what the passwords of the COBOL. I love that 80s jazzy jokes from two re:Invents ago. (John laughs) I got to ask you about the National-Local Governments, how they're monetizing Cloud of the past 18 months. What have you seeing at that level? >> Yeah. National and Local Governments, of course, were tremendously impacted first by the pandemic itself and the health concerns around it, but then all of the secondary effects, you know, unemployment. And immediately, you needed to put into action unemployment benefits systems. We work with the U.S. Small Business Administration, 15 other States across the U.S. You know, to have those systems in place in like weeks to be able to serve the unemployed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then you saw things progress, to the point where we had States across the country, standing up call centers on Amazon Connect. Instantly, they could have a high scalable volume call center that was situated for their instantly remote workforce, as opposed to their old call center technology. So, across the U.S. we saw those. And in fact, around the world, as governments mobilized to be able to respond to citizens. But the final thing that I think is really incredible, is though is the way that the AWS teams and partners sprung into action to work with National Governments around the world. Over 26 National Governments run their vaccine management scheduling systems on AWS. The largest to date, being in India, where in a single day, the vaccine management system scheduled and conducted 22.5 million vaccinations. Which is more than the population of New York State in one week and one day. >> Wow. That's good. That's great progress. I got to say, I mean, that kind of impact is interesting. And we had Shannon Kellogg on earlier, talking about the Virginia impact with the Amazon $220 million being spread over a few Counties just in one year. The partnership between business... and governments with the Cloud, so much more agility. This really strikes at the core of the future of government. >> Max: I think so. People have talked about private-public partnerships for a long time. I'm really proud of some of the work that Amazon and the whole team is doing around the world in those types of public private partnerships. Whether they're in skilling and workforce with partnerships, like eight different States across the U.S. to deliver skills, training through community college based systems. Whether it's with healthcare systems. Like NHS or GEL over in the UK, to really start applying cloud-scale analytics and research to solve the problems that eventually you're going to get us to personalized healthcare. >> That's a great stuff. Cloud benefits are always good. I always say the old joke is, "You hang around the barbershop long enough, you'll get a haircut." And if you get in the Cloud, you can take advantage of the wave. If you don't get on the wave, your driftwood. >> And States found that out, in fact. You'd have customers who were well on their journey. They were really able to turn on a dime. They pivoted quickly. They delivered new mission systems with customers. Those who hadn't quite progressed to the same state, they found out their legacy. IT systems were just brittle and incapable of pivoting so quickly to the new needs. And what we found, John, was that almost overnight, a business, government, which was largely in-person and pretty high touch had to pivot to the point where their only interaction was now a digital system. And those who- >> John: Middle of the day, they could have race car on the track, like quickly. >> Well, we've got it. We do have race cars on the track, right? Every year we've got the artificial intelligence powered Amazon DeepRacer and Red River on the track. >> I can see it. Always a good showing. Final question. I know you got to go on and I appreciate you coming on- >> It's been great. >> with all your busy schedule. Looking ahead. What tech trends should we be watching as Public Sector continues to be powered by this massive structural change? >> Well, I think there's going to be huge opportunity in healthcare. In fact, this afternoon at four o'clock Eastern, we're talking with Dr. Shafiq Rab from Wellforce. He and folks at Veterans Affairs to tell you telehealth and telemedicine are two, the areas where there's still the greatest potential. The number of people who now are serviced, and the ability to service a population far more broadly dispersed, I think has dramatic potential in terms of simply making the planet more healthy. >> Like you said, the pandemics have exposed the right path and the wrong path. And agility, speed, new ways of doing things, telemedicine. Another example, I interviewed a great company that's doing a full stack around healthcare with all kinds of home, agents, virtual agents, really interesting stuff. >> It is. I think it's going to change the world. >> John: Max Peterson, Head of Public Sector. Thank you for coming on theCube, as always. >> John, it's my pleasure. Love the cube. We've always had a good time. >> Yeah. Great stuff. >> Peter: We'll keep on making this difference. >> Hey, there's too many stories. We need another Cube here. So many stories here, impacting the world. Here at the Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>Welcome back to the cubes live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 I'm Lisa Martin and I have with me a cube alumni back, please. Welcome Scott Mullins, the worldwide financial services business development leader at AWS. Scott. Welcome back. Great to have you joining us, >>Lisa. It's great to be back on the cube and to be visiting with you today from virtual re-invent 2020. >>Yes. Reinventing reinvent. The last show that I got to host in-person for the cube was reinvent last year. And here we have this three week virtual event that started last week. So lots more even going on. I think I even saw a hundred thousand or so registered, so massive event, lots of news. So walk us through some of the highlights that have been announced at reinvent this year and some of the things that you're seeing the most interest from customers in. >>Well, I think one of the big highlights is 500,000 registrants that are reinvented 50,000 attendees last year to reinvent or 50,000 or so to 500,000 re registered for the event. So that's, that's, that's worth talking about in its own. Right. But I think, you know, one of the things, and you mentioned this, you know, more re-invent three weeks, uh, this year, as opposed to the four days that we normally spend in Las Vegas together, physically, when you do, when you do it digitally, you have the ability to actually include more things and more leaders talking about things. And so when we think about the announcements that are having impacts, uh, with financial services customers specifically I'd point to a couple of things and, you know, they're obviously gonna mention Andy's keynote, but there's going to be some things that you might go wait a minute. >>I didn't even see that announcement. Uh, and then maybe I could point you and the viewers to some other, other, um, keynotes or some other sessions that were announced. So obviously I think, uh, first and foremost in Andy's keynote, uh, hybrid, uh, was something that was a very, uh, big focus for him and I for a very long time, we've had the messaging of the right tool for the right job when it comes to any of your services. I think you could alter that today to say it's the right tool for the right job at the right time and in the right place. That makes sense for you and especially for financial institutions. Um, you could look at the announcements around containers, the announcements around Amazon EKS, distro, Amazon EKS, anywhere, and then also Amazon ECS anywhere, which allows our customers to actually, uh, put AWS container technology anywhere they would like to put it. >>You could look also at the additions of the one you and two you form factors to outposts. So no longer do you have to do the, the, the large for you, uh, foreign factor for outposts, smaller outposts for smaller spaces, uh, that particular will play well in the financial service industry. You may not have necessarily as much room for a full cabinet. You could also look from the hybrid perspective in the announcement we made, um, around red hat OpenShift on AWS, all of are giving customers the ability to choose how they actually want to deploy, um, and pursue a hybrid. I'd also point to some announcements we made around management and governance in the financial services, industry governance, uh, is a very important topic. Uh, we announced the management and government lens for the AWS well architected, um, uh, program, uh, that is focused on breath practices for evolving governance for the cloud. >>It has recommended combination of AWS services integrations with our partner network and vetted reference architectures and guidance for addressing regulatory obligations as well. I'd also point to some things we made around audits. I was specifically in Steve Smith's, um, session today, he talked about AWS audit manager. That's a new tool for continually assessing areas and environments for controls or risk compliance. That includes prebuilt compliance frameworks for things like PCI DSS and GDPR, uh, two things that are very important in the financial services industry and last, but certainly not least I'd point to the announcement around the AWS audit Academy. This is training for auditors to actually be able to audit clouds from an agnostic perspective. Any cloud, not specifically AWS that's tree, uh, digital training to do that. And then also an instructor led course specifically on how to audit AWS. So some very key announcements, both from the standpoint of services, uh, as well as additional layers of helping customers in the financial services industry in regulated industries actually use our services. >>So typical, re-invent typical in a lot of news, a lot of announcements, the 500,000 Mark in terms of registering. I hadn't heard that. That's amazing. Let's talk that this has been an Andy. Jassy had an exclusive with John furrier just a couple of weeks ago before. I think it was last week, actually. And we've been talking about this acceleration of digital business transformation because of COVID we've been talking about it, the entire pandemic on the virtual cube, talking about how companies it's really about right now, surviving and thriving to be able to go forward and companies that haven't accelerated are probably in some trouble. Talk to me about how AWS has been working with your financial services customers to help them pivot and move to the cloud faster, really to not just help them survive now, but thrive in the long-term. >>Yeah. Immediately when COVID hit and it hit at different times in different, in different parts of the world. Immediately when COVID hit, we saw the conversation that we were having turning from, Hey, what's my digital strategy to immediately, what are my digital capabilities? And what that really means is what do I have the ability to do tomorrow? Because tomorrow is going to really matter. I don't have necessarily the time to plan for the next several quarters or the next several years, what can I do tomorrow to, um, really, uh, support my, my own workforce and support my own customers and the obligations I have as a financial institution. The first thing we saw people do was to try and make sure that those who financial services work can work. You can look at the adoption of Amazon workspaces, as well as our, uh, Amazon connect, uh, call centers as a service. >>As two examples there at the RBL bank in India was able to move to Amazon workspaces in just 10 days to enable its teams to actually work remotely from home. When they couldn't come into the office, you can look at Barclays. Barclays is actually a presenter at re-invent this year. They'll have a session on how they use Amazon connect, which again is our call center as a service offering to enable 25,000 contacts and our agents to work from home when they can no longer work out of the, out of their traditional contact center. The second thing we saw a financial institutions joining was making sure that customer engagements could still be meaningful when digital was the only option, um, specifically here in the U S you could look at the work that each of us did with FinTech companies like biz two X or fins Zack, or BlueVine Stripe and cabbage in support of the care act in the U S you might remember that the cares act, um, hasn't provisions for funding for small businesses. >>This small business administration had a program called the paycheck protection program, and those organizations were active in providing funding, uh, to small businesses. Uh, through that program. I'll give you an example of cabbage cabbage had previously not been an SBA lender, um, but they were able to, in two weeks build a fully automated system for small businesses to access PPP funding using Amazon text track, to extract information from documentation that those folks submitted to get alone. That reduced approval times from multiple days to about a median of four hours to actually get approval, to get funding through the PPP program. And then just four months cabbage became the second largest PPP lender. They lent over $7 billion in funding, which was twice the amount of funding that they went last year in 2019 loans. So we were happy to support organizations like cabbage and those other FinTech companies, as they help small businesses in the U S get access to funding, uh, during this critical time. >>And as we know, as you said, critical time, but really life or death for a lot of businesses. And as we continue to go through these ways, but it's interesting that you talked about that the speed of facilitation that during such unprecedented times, AWS and this massive machine was able to continue moving at full speed ahead and helping those customers to pivot. You talked about the cloud connect. I had a conversation with a guest on the queue last week about that. And, and I now think about if I have to call in a contact center and that person might be from home. So, you know, we're fortunate that the cloud computing technology and people like you and AWS, or are able to power that because it's, it's literally essential, which is probably one of the words of the year, but being able to keep the machinery going and innovate at the same time has been, make or break for a lot of businesses. >>Absolutely. And you, you look at, you know, kind of one of the last year is that I'll point to is, um, financial institutions. Uh, anti-virus, we're were very much focused on making sure that that cannot fail, that they scaled. And so you can look at the work we did with, uh, with the, with FINRA FINRA is the primary capital markets regulator here in the U S and on a daily basis frame or processes about 400 billion market events on every night to do surveillance on our markets, that when COVID hit, we had unprecedented volume and volatility in the market. And FINRA was, was, um, looking at processing, uh, anywhere from two to three times, their normal daily market volumes that's anywhere from 800 billion market events to 1.2 trillion a night. And if you look at how they were able to scale, they're actually able to scale up compute resources in AWS. We're on a nightly basis. They're able to automatically turn on and off up to a hundred thousand compute nodes in a single day. That automatic ability to scale is, is the power you're talking about. Being able to actually turn things up when you needed it and turn things down when you, when you don't need it based on the volumes. >>Well, and that's going to be something key going forward. As we know that there will be one thing I think that I always say we can count on right now is uncertainty and continued uncertainty, but we've also seen I'm calling them COVID catalysts. You know, the, what you talked about with cabbage, for example, and how that business pivoted quickly, because of the power of cloud computing and emerging technologies, what are some of the things that you think as we go into 2021 in the financial services arena, what are some of the big tech trends that you think were maybe born during COVID that are going to be critical going forward? >>Well, you know, you, you, you had Melanie Frank from capital one on cube a couple of days ago, and she was talking about, you know, their shift to cloud and what that's really enabled, and it, and she kind of sums it up nicely. She says, look, we want to give our customers experience that are real time, and that are intelligent. And you just can't do that with legacy technology. That's sitting in, you know, kind of a legacy data center. And so I think that's going to be kind of the, the, the all encompassing statement for what's happening in the financial services industry. As I mentioned, you know, organizations overnight said, okay, wait a minute, let's take that strategy. And then let's put it aside. Let's talk about capabilities. What can we do? And I think, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. Um, and when you're faced with limitations and challenges, like we all have been faced with around the world and not just in the financial services industry, it, it breeds, um, invention and the, and the desire and the need to actually meet those challenges head on, in very engineered of ways. >>And I think you're going to see more invention and specifically more invention from the established players in the financial services industry. Cloud use is not just experimental on the edges anymore. You're going to see more organizations coming out of COVID. Um, having had those experiences where they actually stood up a context center and scaled it. And, and just a matter of a few days to, to thousands of agents, you're going to find, um, organizations saying, wait a minute, we, we can do remote work. We could, we have access to things like Amazon workspaces. So I think you're, you're gonna, you're going to see that, uh, be a, be a trend. I think you're also gonna see, um, w what Lori beer said in the keynote with Andy, you know, she, she made a very, very astute statement, and I don't know if people caught it, cause it's kind of neat in the middle of her conversation. >>She said, look, we're trying to infuse analytics into everything that we do at JP Morgan. I think you're going to see more and more financial institutions looking to do that, to actually leverage the power of analytics, to power everything we do as a financial institution. So I think those, those are a couple of things that you're going to see. Um, and then, you know, looking, uh, you know, kind of around the corner, I think you're going to continue to see more re-invention within the industry. And what I mean by that is you've seen many financial institutions over the last week, uh, with, uh, re-invent making announcements, you saw bank and we towel saying, Hey, look, we are completely transforming ourselves with AWS. Uh, just a few weeks before we even saw standard charter, the same thing HSBC said, the same thing, global payments earlier in the year said the same thing. And you're going to see more and more organizations coming out and talking about these strategic decisions to reinvent everything that they do to make the financial systems of the world work. And so we're really pleased to be partnering with those organizations to make those transformations possible. We're seeing a lot of invention within the industry, and we're very pleased to be a part of the reinvention of the financial systems around the world. >>It's interesting to hear that you, you see, even the JP Morgan, some of those legacy, big houses are going to be really pivoting. They have to, to be competitive and to be able to utilize analytics, to deliver those real-time services. Because as we all know, as consumers, our patients is wearing thin these days, but I agree with you. I think there's a lot of opportunity there that innovation is exciting and there will have to be reinvention of entire industries, but I think there's a lot of silver linings there. Scott. I wish we had more time, cause I know we could keep talking, but thank you for sharing your insights on this reinvented reinvent this year. >>I appreciate it. Thank you, Lisa. It's always a pleasure to be on the cube. >>Chris Scott Mullins, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020.

>> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of UiPath Live, the release show. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Hi everybody this is Dave Valenti, welcome back to our RPA Drill Down. Ted Kummert is here he is Executive Vice President for Products and Engineering at UiPath. Ted, thanks for coming on, great to see you. >> Dave, it's great to be here, thanks so much. >> Dave your background is pretty interesting, you started as a Silicon Valley Engineer, they pulled you out, you did a huge stint at Microsoft. You got experience in SAS, you've got VC chops with Madrona. And at Microsoft you saw it all, the NT, the CE Space, Workflow, even MSN you did stuff with MSN, and then the all important data. So I'm interested in what attracted you to UiPath? >> Yeah Dave, I feel super fortunate to have worked in the industry in this span of time, it's been an amazing journey, and I had a great run at Microsoft it was fantastic. You mentioned one experience in the middle there, when I first went to the server business, the enterprise business, I owned our Integration and Workflow products, and I would say that's the first I encountered this idea. Often in the software industry there are ideas that have been around for a long time, and what we're doing is refining how we're delivering them. And we had ideas we talked about in terms of Business Process Management, Business Activity Monitoring, Workflow. The ways to efficiently able somebody to express the business process in a piece of software. Bring systems together, make everybody productive, bring humans into it. These were the ideas we talked about. Now in reality there were some real gaps. Because what happened in the technology was pretty different from what the actual business process was. And so lets fast forward then, I met Madrona Venture Group, Seattle based Venture Capital Firm. We actually made a decision to participate in one of UiPath's fundraising rounds. And that's the first I really came encountered with the company and had to have more than an intellectual understanding of RPA. 'Cause when I first saw it, I said "oh, I think that's desktop automation" I didn't look very close, maybe that's going to run out of runway, whatever. And then I got more acquainted with it and figured out "Oh, there's a much bigger idea here". And the power is that by really considering the process and the implementation from the humans work in, then you have an opportunity really to automate the real work. Not that what we were doing before wasn't significant, this is just that much more powerful. And that's when I got really excited. And then the companies statistics and growth and everything else just speaks for itself, in terms of an opportunity to work, I believe, in one of the most significant platforms going in the enterprise today, and work at one of the fastest growing companies around. It was like almost an automatic decision to decide to come to the company. >> Well you know, you bring up a good point you think about software historically through our industry, a lot of it was 'okay here's this software, now figure out how to map your processes to make it all work' and today the processes, especially you think about this pandemic, the processes are unknown. And so the software really has to be adaptable. So I'm wondering, and essentially we're talking about a fundamental shift in the way we work. And is there really a fundamental shift going on in how we write software and how would you describe that? >> Well there certainly are, and in a way that's the job of what we do when we build platforms for the enterprises, is try and give our customers a new way to get work done, that's more efficient and helps them build more powerful applications. And that's exactly what RPA does, the efficiency, it's not that this is the only way in software to express a lot of this, it just happens to be the quickest. You know in most ways. Especially as you start thinking about initiatives like our StudioX product to what we talk about as enabling citizen developers. It's an expression that allows customers to just do what they could have done otherwise much more quickly and efficient. And the value on that is always high, certainly in an unknown era like this, it's even more valuable, there are specific processes we've been helping automate in the healthcare, in financial services, with things like SBA Loan Processing, that we weren't thinking about six months ago, or they weren't thinking about six months ago. We're all thinking about how we're reinventing the way we work as individuals and corporations because of what's going on with the coronavirus crisis, having a platform like this that gives you agility and mapping the real work to what your computer state and applications all know how to do, is even more valuable in a climate like that. >> What attracted us originally to UiPath, we knew Bobby Patrick CMO, he said "Dave, go download a copy, go build some automations and go try it with some other companies". So that really struck us as wow, this is actually quite simple. Yet at the same time, and so you've of course been automating all these simple tasks, but now you've got real aspiration, you're glomming on to this term of Hyperautomation, you've made some acquisitions, you've got a vision, that really has taken you beyond 'paving the cow path' I sometimes say, of all these existing processes. It's really trying to discover new processes and opportunities for automation, which you would think after 50 or whatever years we've been in this industry, we'd have attacked a lot of it, but wow, seems like we have a long way to go. Again, especially what we're learning through this pandemic. Your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I'd say Hyperautomation. It's actually a Gartner term, it's not our term. But there is a bigger idea here, built around the core automation platform. So let's talk for a second just what's not about the core platform and then what Hyperautomation really means around that. And I think of that as the bookends of how do I discover and plan, how do I improve my ability to do more automations, and find the real opportunities that I have. And how do I measure and optimize? And that's a lot of what we delivered in 20.4 as a new capability. So let's talk about discover and plan. One aspect of that is the wisdom of the crowd. We have a product we call Automation Hub that is all about that. Enabling people who have ideas, they're the ones doing the work, they have the observation into what efficiencies can be. Enabling them to either with our Ask Capture Utility capture that and document that, or just directly document that. And then, people across the company can then collaborate eventually moving on building the best ideas out of that. So there's capturing the crowd, and then there's a more scientific way of capturing actually what the opportunities are. So we've got two products we introduced. One is process mining, and process mining is about going outside in from the, let's call it the larger processes, more end to end processes in the enterprise. Things like order-to-cash and procure-to-pay, helping you understand by watching the events, and doing the analytics around that, where your bottle necks, where are you opportunities. And then task mining said "let's watch an individual, or group of individuals, what their tasks are, let's watch the log of events there, let's apply some machine learning processing to that, and say here's the repetitive things we've found." And really helping you then scientifically discover what your opportunities are. And these ideas have been along for a long time, process mining is not new. But the connection to an automation platform, we think is a new and powerful idea, and something we plan to invest a lot in going forward. So that's the first bookend. And then the second bookend is really about attaching rich analytics, so how do I measure it, so there's operationally how are my robots doing? And then there's everything down to return on investment. How do I understand how they are performing, verses what I would have spent if I was continuing to do them the old way. >> Yeah that's big 'cause (laughing) the hero reports for the executives to say "hey, this is actually working" but at the same time you've got to take a systems view. You don't want to just optimize one part of the system at the detriment to others. So you talk about process mining, which is kind of discovering the backend systems, ERP and the like, where the task mining it sounds like it's more the collaboration and front end. So that whole system thinking, really applies, doesn't it? >> Yeah. Very much so. Another part of what we talked about then, in the system is, how do we capture the ideas and how do we enable more people to build these automations? And that really gets down to, we talk about it in our company level vision, is a robot for every person. Every person should have a digital assistant. It can help you with things you do less frequently, it can help you with things you do all the time to do your job. And how do we help you create those? We've released a new tool we call StudioX. So for our RPA Developers we have Studio, and StudioX is really trying to enable a citizen developer. It's not unlike the art that we saw in Business Intelligence there was the era where analytics and reporting were the domain of experts, and they produced formalized reports that people could consume. But the people that had the questions would have to work with them and couldn't do the work themselves. And then along comes ClickView and Tableau and Power BI enabling the self services model, and all of a sudden people could do that work themselves, and that enabled powerful things. We think the same arch happens here, and StudioX is really our way of enabling that, citizen developer with the ideas to get some automation work done on their own. >> Got a lot in this announcement, things like document understanding, bring your own AI with AI fabric, how are you able to launch so many products, and have them fit together, you've made some acquisitions. Can you talk about the architecture that enables you to do that? >> Yeah, it's clearly in terms of ambition, and I've been there for 10 weeks, but in terms of ambition you don't have to have been there when they started the release after Forward III in October to know that this is the most ambitious thing that this company has ever done from a release perspective. Just in terms of the surface area we're delivering across now as an organization, is substantive. We talk about 1,000 feature improvements, 100's of discreet features, new products, as well as now our automation cloud has become generally available as well. So we've had muscle building over this past time to become world class at offering SAS, in addition to on-premises. And then we've got this big surface area, and architecture is a key component of how you can do this. How do you deliver efficiently the same software on-premises and in the cloud? Well you do that by having the right architecture and making the right bets. And certainly you look forward, how are companies doing this today? It's really all about Cloud-Native Platform. But it's about an architecture such that we can do that efficiently. So there is a lot about just your technical strategy. And then it's just about a ton of discipline and customer focus. It keeps you focused on the right things. StudioX was a great example of we were led by customers through a lot of what we actually delivered, a couple of the major features in it, certainly the out of box templates, the studio governance features, came out of customer suggestions. I think we had about 100 that we have sitting in the backlog, a lot of which we've already done, and really being disciplined and really focused on what customers are telling. So make sure you have the right technical strategy and architecture, really follow your customers, and really stay disciplined and focused on what matters most as you execute on the release. >> What can we learn from previous examples, I think about for instance SQL Server, you obviously have some knowledge in it, it started out pretty simple workloads and then at the time we all said "wow, it's a lot more powerful to come from below that it is, if a Db2, or an Oracle sort of goes down market", Microsoft proved that, obviously built in the robustness necessary, is there a similar metaphor here with regard to things like governance and security, just in terms of where UiPath started and where you see it going? >> Well I think the similarities have more to do with we have an idea of a bigger platform that we're now delivering against. In the database market, that was, we started, SQL Server started out as more of just a transactional database product, and ultimately grew to all of the workloads in the data platform, including transaction for transactional apps, data warehousing and as well as business intelligence. I see the same analogy here of thinking more broadly of the needs, and what the ability of an integrated platform, what it can do to enable great things for customers, I think that's a very consistent thing. And I think another consistent thing is know who you are. SQL Server knew exactly who it had to be when it entered the database market. That it was going to set a new benchmark on simplicity, TCO, and that was going to be the way it differentiated. In this case, we're out ahead of the market, we have a vision that's broader than a lot of the market is today. I think we see a lot of people coming in to this space, but we see them building to where we were, and we're out ahead. So we are operating from a leadership position, and I'm not going to tell you one's easier that the other, and both you have to execute with great urgency. But we're really executing out ahead, so we've got to keep thinking about, and there's no one's tail lights to follow, we have to be the ones really blazing the trail on what all of this means. >> I want to ask you about this incorporation of existing systems. Some markets they take off, it's kind of a one shot deal, and the market just embeds. I think you guys have bigger aspirations than that, I look at it like a service now, misunderstood early on, built the platform and now really is fundamental part of a lot of enterprises. I also look at things like EDW, which again, you have some experience in. In my view it failed to live up to a lot of it's promises even though it delivered a lot of value. You look at some of the big data initiatives, you know EDW still plugs in, it's the system of record, okay that's fine. How do you see RPA evolving? Are we going to incorporate, do we have to embrace existing business process systems? Or is this largely a do-over in your opinion? >> Well I think it's certainly about a new way of building automation, and it's starting to incorporate and include the other ways, for instance in the current release we added support for long running workflow, it was about human workflow based scenarios, now the human is collaborating with the robot, and we built those capabilities. So I do see us combining some of the old and new way. I think one of the most significant things here, is also that impact that AI and ML based technologies and skills can have on the power of the automations that we deliver. We've certainly got a surface area that, I think about our AI and ML strategy in two parts, that we are building first class first party skills, that we're including in the platform, and then we're building a platform for third parties and customers to bring their what their data science teams have delivered, so those can also be a part of our ecosystem, and part of automations. And so things like document understanding, how do I easily extract data from more structured, semi-structured and completely unstructured documents, accurately? And include those in my automations. Computer vision which gives us an ability to automate at a UI level across other types of systems than say a Windows and a browser base application. And task mining is built on a very robust, multi layer ML system, and the innovation opportunity that I think just consider there, you know continue there. You think it's a macro level if there's aspects of machine learning that are about captured human knowledge, well what exactly is an automation that captured where you're capturing a lot of human knowledge. The impact of ML and AI are going to be significant going out into the future. >> Yeah, I want to ask you about them, and I think a lot of people are just afraid of AI, as a separate thing and they have to figure out how to operationalize it. And I think companies like UiPath are really in a position to embed UI into applications AI into applications everywhere, so that maybe those folks that haven't climbed on the digital bandwagon, who are now with this pandemic are realizing "wow, we better accelerate this" they can actually tap machine intelligence through your products and others as well. Your thoughts on that sort of narrative? >> Yeah, I agree with that point of view, it's AI and ML is still maturing discipline across the industry. And you have to build new muscle, and you build new muscle and data science, and it forces you to think about data and how you manage your data in a different way. And that's a journey we've been on as a company to not only build our first party skills, but also to build the platform. It's what's given us the knowledge that to help us figure out, well what do we need to include here so our customers can bring their skills, actually to our platform, and I do think this is a place where we're going to see the real impact of AI and ML in a broader way. Based on the kind of apps it is and the kind of skills we can bring to bear. >> Okay last question, you're ten weeks in, when you're 50, 100, 200 weeks in, what should we be watching, what do you want to have accomplished? >> Well we're listening, we're obviously listening closely to our customers, right now we're still having a great week, 'cause there's nothing like shipping new software. So right now we're actually thinking deeply about where we're headed next. We see there's lots of opportunities and robot for every person, and that initiative, and so we're launched a bunch of important new capabilities there, and we're going to keep working with the market to understand how we can, how we can add additional capability there. We've just got the GA of our automation cloud, I think you should expect more and more services in our automation cloud going forward. I think this area we talked about, in terms of AI and ML and those technologies, I think you should expect more investment and innovation there from us and the community, helping our customers, and I think you will also see us then, as we talked about this convergence of the ways we bring together systems through integrate and build business process, I think we'll see a convergence into the platform of more of those methods. I look ahead to the next releases, and want to see us making some very significant releases that are advancing all of those things, and continuing our leadership in what we talk about now as the Hyperautomation platform. >> Well Ted, lot of innovation opportunities and of course everybody's hopping on the automation bandwagon. Everybody's going to want a piece of your RPA hide, and you're in the lead, we're really excited for you, we're excited to have you on theCUBE, so thanks very much for all your time and your insight. Really appreciate it. >> Yeah, thanks Dave, great to spend this time with you. >> All right thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Velanti for theCUBE, and our RPA Drill Down Series, keep it right there we'll be right back, right after this short break. (calming instrumental music)

>> Male Narrator: Live from San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube, covering QuickBooks Connect 2016. Now here are your hosts Jeff Frick and John Walls. >> And welcome back inside the San Jose Convention Center here at the Cube, along with Jeff Frick, I'm John Walls, appreciate you joining us here as we continue our coverage of QuickBooks Connect 2016, live here on SiliconANGLE TV. This is the flagship broadcast where we extract the signal from the noise. And Jeff, we're on the home stretch here through the second day, I could stay here for a few more days. Great guests, great lineups, great keynotes, and a lot of energy here on the floor I like. >> Lot of energy, I love these kinds of shows because it's really about helping people be successful and we're talking about real things, and again we keep coming back to products and solutions in technology but for most small businesses it's about cash. It's about cash flow. >> Being successful, Rania Succar, is now joining us, she's a QuickBooks Financing and Director there at QuickBooks, and we appreciate your time here, Rania. >> Great. >> So tell us about just the overarching mission, right, cause as Jeff said, helping people, giving them access to capital, badly needed, small businesses, it's a critical need, and what QuickBooks does on that, with that, on the financing platform. >> Well you guys have seen it here for the last few days. The QuickBooks team is absolutely focused on helping small businesses survive and thrive. Everyone here's trying to crack that, and you just said it, cash is one of the biggest pain points that small businesses face. Whenever we talk to small businesses, the first thing they tell us is the thing that keeps them up at night is cash flow, and we also know one of the biggest reasons that small businesses fail is they can't get access to cash flow, and to cash, and so the team a couple years back said we've got to crack this in order to help more small businesses survive past the five year mark and be able to put their dreams into action. So with that in mind, we took a look at financing and for small businesses, it's a fairly broken process, so we're working to reinvent small business lending. It's broken for a couple of reasons, one is, if you have ten businesses that go into a bank to apply for a loan, only three get approved, and it takes over 30 hours of work for a small business to do that application to a bank, so it's right for innovating and improving the experience for small businesses, so what we do, is we're hyper focused on making the experience better in three ways, first, we're trying to drive up the approval rate, and we do that with the incredible clarity and we do that with the incredible clarity with which we can understand the small business based on the data that we have. We understand the small business ecosystem better than anyone, and we understand the full picture of a small business' credit worthiness, and financial health better than everyone, anyone. We can give them access to-- we can help them get credit for all the future invoices that they have coming in, we understand the strength of their customer base, you put that together, we can drive approval rates up. The other thing we're focused on is the time it takes to apply. You need to put together tax returns, and interim financial reports if it's the middle of the year, and bank statements, it's very frustrating. We have most of that information in the Intuit space, and our vision is rather than even applying it's just available for you in QuickBooks when you need it, and the third thing, so approval rates, the time it takes, the third thing we're very focused on is the guidance. Small businesses need advice, most of them didn't get into running their own small business because they knew anything about finances, they had a dream and they wanted to put it into place, and so we're very focused on taking the insights we have about a small business to help them get lending that's right for them with confidence that they're getting the right financing for their business. So we can help them predict when they're going to need financing, and we can connect them to an accountant because we know over a million of our small businesses are connected to accountants. So that's what we do, and this week as you heard, we just announced we crossed the half a billion dollar mark in financing in small businesses. >> Now, say that again. >> Half a billion dollars. >> Half a billion dollars of financing. >> Congratulations. >> We're incredibly proud, we're incredibly proud. >> Let me ask you a couple details, so my kids are going, they're applying for college right now, so the CommonApp-- >> So, Jeff will need somewhere shy of half a million of that money. (Rania laughs) >> Do you have like a CommonApp inside QuickBooks which is a defined kind of definition that then gets shared with the lenders that want to participate in the market, or do you have like a defined QuickBooks FICO score, if you will, based on these other parameters that you have that then get shared with the lenders, how do you kind of, you've got all this data, it's my data, but I'm allowing you to use in such a way to help me get this loan in this market place. How does the actual mechanics work. >> I love that, we're a platform, almost like an Amazon in a sense, where you go to Amazon, you have one thing that you want to get and you get access to multiple different providers, so we're a platform. Right now, the way that it works, there is a CommonApp, but the amazing thing is you don't have to fill it out because we have all the information inside QuickBooks so we pre-fill it for you and ask you just for a couple of things but we do all the work and then we figure out which of our lending partners based on what you need, we've got about a dozen, are best suited for your needs, and then we send the information to the lenders with your permission and then you get all your offers right there, and the really neat thing about what we do is we compare the offers apples to apples, this is pretty incredible, we're super focused on transparency, this is a big part of our value proposition, we always disclose the APR of the loan, we always show the loan cost apples to apples so that you know exactly what you're getting, we show you things like what are the fees, what are the pre-payment penalties, so it's super clear, super transparent, and you know what you're getting. >> It's like the comparison shopping table. >> Exactly. >> You lay it all out and I can make my decisions. >> Exactly. >> And then how long does it usually take on a relatively smooth process given the fact you're already pre-populating the data, it goes out, what does it usually take? >> A lot of our lenders fund within the same day. >> Jeff: Within the same day? >> So you literally with a lot of our lenders, if everything goes right, you can apply within minutes and get funding in your bank account the same business day. >> The money goes through the same system as well. (Jeff chuckles) >> There are lenders, and we have a portfolio of offerings, so we'll work with, we have an SBA lender, we've got work in capital lenders, if you're going through the SBA process it's a lot faster through our process than it would be if you applied through a traditional bank, but it still could take a couple of months in that case, so we make that very clear, when you choose the offering that you want, if you're in need for financing right away, it can happen very quickly, if you're willing to wait a couple more months, in the worst case, in the case of an SBA loan, on average, it's less than a week. >> Well it seems like you have so many pieces in place to make it much more convenient and much more reliable and I guess much more predictable for a small business, what about approval rates then, what, you said three out of ten? >> That's the current. >> On average, is that the current, is that your average? >> Ours is better than that, it's not quite there, you know, we have a really high aspiration on that, where we'd like to be able to get, you know, we'd like to get it closer to 60 or 70 percent over time, the approval rate, so we're still moving in that direction, we've got a great team, we've got tons of innovation and R&D happening right now back in Mountain View, we've got a ton of data scientists that are combing through this data and improving the approval rates all the time, so that's an area where we're innovating and really pushing for our small businesses. >> And so, nice announcement this week, well better than nice, great announcement this week, but you're always looking, as you said, for the next best thing. >> Rania: Yep. >> And so what have you heard from your client base that says okay, we've addressed this, now this is where we need to pivot, this is where we need to go, like what's the next big hurdle or next big challenge that you think you need to handle? >> It's innovating on those three areas I told you, and on each of those three we've made quite a lot of work and quite a lot of headway in the last few years, but there's so much more room, and so like I've said we have this team of phenomenal data scientists working to find those areas of advantage for small businesses where we can help them get approved more often. We've got the team that's trying to really make it to a point where you're in QuickBooks and you can see your financing offer before you even apply. We want to get rid of the application altogether and just service the best offer for you, and then all the prediction for when you're going to need financing and that cash flow prediction, looping in the accountant so the accountant can immediately see all the options you were given and they can talk through them with you. >> And your clients can find out right away, the customers, if they did not get approved. >> Right. >> Where's the trouble area, where did the red light come on? >> That's right. >> Because of the figures you're able to consult with them and help them maybe shore up their bottom line? >> We don't do enough of that today, it's absolutely in our road map, so that's a huge opportunity because we have a relationship with small businesses, it's not like a transaction where you go to a website and you apply for a loan, we're in it for the long term to help small businesses grow and so you can imagine, and this is where we're headed, when you start, you know, you get your first financing, it could be a credit card, and then a year or two later we see that you're financials have improved and we consult you on the next offering and all the way you get better terms because you've been with us for a while and we can help make sure you're getting better financing deals over time. >> It's a really interesting situation, because, you know, hopefully over time, really it becomes, we always talk about kind of looking back, and then predictive and then prescriptive, so in theory, as you're moving down your path, as you're growing your business, it should actually flag you, right, hey, by the way you've got a big event, seasonalities coming up, oh we just noticed you just locked in a big purchase order, somebody's late to pay et cetera, it might be a good time to get actually ahead of the curve before you even know that this event is coming to go ahead and make even up to in making the offer. >> Absolutely, you know, you're getting ready to, you know, for the holidays and have you thought about making sure you've got enough financing to buy as much inventory as you want this year so you can take advantage of the seasonal trends we're seeing. Or we're seeing a lot of retailers, you know, really heavying up on inventory, have you thought about doing that as apart of your strategy, it looks like it could be a good year, so there's so much opportunity there, we can pair every small business owner with a line of credit so that they can manage payroll at any given time and never have to worry about the cash flow ups and downs that come. >> Right, and then I would imagine too, within like those different offers, not only apples to apples across the same type of loan, but maybe you should consider, you know, a factoring on your receivables, versus a capital loan that's capitalized against some equipment or something, cause there's also options within the types of financing that you may want to do. >> So on that we've done quite bit of work. We have lenders in our portfolio that do invoice financing. We've got lenders in our portfolio, Amex working capital terms, that do vendor bill payment through, you know, paying all of your bills that are coming up, we've got as I said SBA loans that will help with long term expansion, we've got that, and we're just continuing to innovate on that too. >> And from the lender point of you, you said you have about a dozen, you're bringing in more, you know, for the opportunity, cause a lot of them probably already have existing relationships with many of these clients, how do they see kind of the opportunity to interface for those clients in this different way through QuickBooks as an intermediary? >> Oh, they love it, because it's very hard for these lenders to go out and acquire new customers, often times they don't have a relationship with these existing customers and they have to go out and do the hard work to acquire customers whereas they're in the QuickBooks ecosystem and, you know, customers really love the opportunity to work with these lenders because we can provide the right advice to them paired with the loan offering, so it works out very well. >> It should be cheaper for them to actually provide those too, cause again you're taking a lot of the headache out. So, before we went live, you talked about some of the numbers, I just want to go through some of the numbers, so you shared the big number 500 million. >> Yep. >> But in terms of kind of an average loan size that you see, in a lifetime value of the loans to some of the customers, I was wondering if you could share some of those statistics. >> Sure, so we see two very different needs for financing from our customer base, there's the work and capital loans, and there's the expansion capital loans, and our customers typically are split between the need for both and at any given time, a business is actually looking for both. They need to smooth over the work and capital and then the expansion capital as well, but our average loan size is about 35,000 dollars today, and it ranges from as little as 2,500 dollars to just smooth a very small cashflow bump that you have, all the way up to 250-500 thousand dollars to do some of the all the way up to 250-500 thousand dollars to do some of the bigger expansions that small businesses are looking to do, and it's really wonderful to be able to help small businesses on both sides of the spectrum because if you're a small business owner, seasonality is really a major pain point. Often times, they'll have most of their business concentrated in the summer months, or potentially the summer months and the winter months, but not the spring and the fall, and so you need, you still have tons of bills, you have employees you need to cover in those off months, and having access to financing where you can get it fairly quickly cause you don't know when those bumps are going to hit, is incredibly valuable. On the flip side, the expansion side, every business owners dream is to expand and it's been amazing to be here over the past few days and hear these stories, you know, Alli Webb on stage yesterday, the founder of Drybar, talking about how she went from one location to 66 in 5 years, and so it's very hard to go into a bank branch in 5 years, and so it's very hard to go into a bank branch and convince them of your grand idea to expand. >> Jeff: Especially if they don't have hair. >> Especially if they don't have hair, she had a hard time... (everyone laughs) >> Her husband and her brother are business partners and they're both bald. >> Yeah, they're sitting with them, they don't have hair either, so. >> So for that reason, it's hard to convince people, and so it's wonderful to be able to help the expansion side of things too. >> Hopefully this has been, if nothing else, a great opportunity for Frick Inc. to find out about the small business college fund. >> Jeff: It's already gone through. >> That quick. >> John: Right, so we'll find out in less than 24 hours. The kids are going to Stanford. >> Alright. >> Or you're going to work at the community college for a bit. Rania we appreciate the time. >> Sure, it was great. >> Very much, thank you for being here. >> Thank you. >> And congratulations on the Amex announcement, and so many other great things you have in the pipeline now to make small business dreams come true. >> Wonderful, thank you very much, it was great to chat with you. >> Thank you very much Rania. Back with more here on the Cube from San Jose in just a moment. (hip tech music)