>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBES coverage, of AWS re:Invent 2020 virtual. This is theCUBE virtual, I'm John Furrier, your host. We're not there in person this year because of the pandemic, but we're doing the remote. This is special coverage of the public sector, we got two great guests, Manpreet Mattu, who was the Worldwide Public Sector of Startups and Venture Capital team with AWS, and Michael Jackson who's the leader, general manager of Public Health and Venture Capital and Startups. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me. Thanks for coming up. >> Okay, it's my pleasure, thanks for having. >> I loved love welcome to theCUBE. I just want to say that Amazon never forgets the startups, that's where are they were born and bred it's been a startup. It's always day one as the expression goes, but truly even with the success, not just in the enterprise and starts within public sector, it's still a startup agility mindset, just want to call that out and say congratulations. Okay, let's get into it. Tell us about your roles and your backgrounds and why you're here. >> So, I believe so, I'm the head of AWS Public Sector, VC and Startups team, and our mission really is to help our public sector customers, adopt innovation that is built by the startups. I've been with AWS for about two and a half years. And prior to that, I was in a similar role with Booz Allen, helping our public sector customers, adopt innovation data as well. >> Michael. >> Yeah, so I am the general manager of Public Health, for on the Venture Capital and Startups team. My career here at AWS began just over four years ago. I was brought on to the state and local government team, initially building the public health practice from inception, and I also built and led our U S elections business. And I'm really excited now to transition into this global role, to lead our public health VC and startups practice, and really democratize access to innovation for our startups in the healthcare space. >> Well, great journey. You guys are converging, the VC and startup teams are coming together. A lot of macro trends certainly are tailwinds for you guys. Obviously, the pandemic is forcing, more accelerated modern applications in public sector, and we've been covering more and more success stories, of the change happening quickly. As access to capital continues to be great, and agility with the cloud, how has that impacted your teams and your approach? Can you guys share how that's changed this year? Because there's more pressure now to be digital, there's more opportunities, there's more still capital flowing, how has it impacted your roles? >> Now, so at the very high level, Amazon invests in companies because, we want those companies to be successful. And AWS itself makes a substantial investment, in agility, the startup customers success. We have things like service credits and things like, business nurturing programs that we have built over the course of the last seven, eight years. For example, over the past, you had a loan, Amazon has provided more than a billion dollars in credits, through AWS Activate program, to help startups grow and scale their businesses. And not only that a total of more than three and a half billion dollars in credit to more than 140,000 startups, over the last seven years, all through the course of the Activate program. From more so, on the healthcare side, I would want, certainly MJ to also, speak through or speak to, the challenges that the health system has faced in the COVID times, and how AWS is helping the provider, healthcare providers and the startups, really achieve success, and help the patient populations on that note. >> Michael, weighing on this new programs, you guys are launching in the impact healthcare, I see where we're seeing the frontline workers, I mean, it's everyone seeing it on TV and the newspaper, and it's impacting friends and family, give us the update. >> Absolutely, so we're here today to launch a new program. We call it the Healthcare Acceleration program. And basically, there are two halves to the program, with an undercurrent or a recurring undercurrent, I should say. Just really quickly before I touch on that though, I'd be remissed if I didn't make note of the fact that, you're right capital is still flowing, and it's a really big deal particularly, as healthcare and public health becomes such a priority, but one of the strategic imperatives of our team's role, similar to the way we democratize access to innovation for startups, we also find it really important to democratize access, to resources for founders, underrepresented founders, so, that everyone can have a level playing field, and equal access to those resources and funding, and things of that nature. Getting back to some of the healthcare priorities, in particular, I don't have to tell you about, this pandemic where on the third, and possibly the deadliest wave losing over 1000 Americans per day. And so, not only are we interested in helping our customers, our enterprise customers inject innovation from startups so that they can address clinical aspects, of the pandemic and beyond, but there are underlying rippling societal implications as well. Things that have been exacerbated by the pandemic. Things like mental health, behavioral health, including substance use abuse, clinical clinician burnout, things like social determinants of health, which lead to disproportionately impacted demographics. So, there's a whole lot to unpack and I'm sure we will, but at the highest level, that's what we're looking to help, our enterprise customers address, with the help of our innovative high potential startups. >> I mean, strategic focus, just go a little bit further on how important this is, because, programs are needed, there is burnout, okay. >> Yeah. >> You have mental health, physical health, everything in between. What are you guys launching? What's new? What can people take away right now from AWS, and what startups and when, 'cause a lot of people are changing their focus. I was seeing people leave their jobs, to have to get on this new mission. They're seeing the pain, there's a lot of entrepreneurial energy, happening right now here. Go further, please. >> So, you touched right on it. So, there are two sides. I mentioned there are two halves, and an underlying current, right? So, the two halves are the supply and the demand. The supply side is what we refer to as the startups, vetted high potential, high growth startups, in the health tech space, that we can help to accelerate their go to market, right? We can pair them with mentorship, credits, we call it the 4Cs. There's capital, mapping them potentially to investors, who are interested into accelerating their growth. There's code, technical support, whether it's cloud formation templates, or technical expertise, connections such as other startups, incubators, accelerators, etcetera, and finally mapping them to customers. So, that's, what's in it for the startups. And then on the other side, the enterprise side, again, there are so many enterprises from payers to providers and others who are looking to accelerate their efforts, to digitally transform their enterprise. And so, by partnering with AWS, and the Healthcare Acceleration program, they can trust that there are AWS powered startups, that are vetted and prepared, to inject that sense of urgency, that sense of innovation. And the underlying current, the dots that are being connected is, workforce modernization or economic development, because in many cases, you're right, people are losing their jobs, people are looking at ways that they can, modernize the workforce is locally leverage local talent. And so, entrepreneurship is a great way, to stimulate the local economy, and help older workers or workers who are looking to transition into a more relevant occupations, to do just that. So, this is an all encompassing program. >> Let's get into this health accelerator from AWS. This is something that is on the table, AWS Health Accelerator, who are the stakeholders, and what are the benefits of this program? >> Well, I mean, before we actually, go to the accelerator for me, I think there's this focus on the healthcare, as an industry, as a vertical, is very important to talk about. The industry is experiencing transformation. It is experiencing disruption and the COVID-19 pandemic, has only accelerated that. If you made, it has sort of magnified some of the stressors, which were already there in the system. If you combine that with the sort of the undercurrent that MJ mentioned from a technological perspective, the delivery of healthcare globally is going digital. So, you see technology is like artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, augmented reality, IoT based variables. All of these technologies are coming together, to enable applications, such as remote diagnostics, patient monitoring, predictive prescriptive healthcare. And we truly feel that this presents a tremendous opportunity to improve the patient experience, and more importantly, the patient outcomes, using these technologies, and these newly enabled applications through those technologies. And as an example, in the U S alone, there are 22 key healthcare AI use cases, that are projected to grow by, or to approximately around $22 billion by 2025. So, in AWS, we are collaborating with the wide spectrum of healthcare providers, with public health organizations, with government agencies, all around the globe to support their effort, to cope with the rippling effects of the COVID-19. And arguably, many of them are visible to us today, but I would argue that many many are not even yet, have been begun to understand by us and by our customers. So, that is the reason why we want to put some emphasis, on healthcare from a public sector standpoint. >> Yeah, that's a great call-out Manpreet, I want to just highlight that, maybe get an additional commentary because, the old days it was just the institution, the hospital and then you're done. And then it was okay, hospital plus the caregiver, the doctors, and the workers, and now the patient. So, holistically, you're calling out the big picture, the patient care, right. Their families, their environment, the caregivers, and the institution, and now the supply chain, all of it integrated together. That's where the action is. And that's where the data comes in, that's where cloud scale can come in. Is that right? Am I getting that right there? >> Yeah, that's absolutely. I'm sorry Manpreet. >> Welcome MJ, go on. >> I was going to say you're absolutely right. In fact, we like to look at it almost like a bullseye, right? So, at the center of the bullseye, like you said, usually, the first stakeholder that comes to mind, is the provider or the coordinator of care. Outside of there, you have the payer, outside of there, you have researchers. And in any even further outside still are your regulators, your healthcare agencies at the local state, and federal levels, including military health. So, it's a rippling effect of customers on that side, as well as you asked about stakeholders on the startup side, there's also a bullseye of influence. Starting with the founder herself, the founder, and her executive team, moving out from there to the startup, as an organization outside from there, we've got incubators and accelerators that are in place, to help accelerate that growth as well. And then farther out you've got investors, VCs, and investors, and so on both sides, supply and demand we're looking to tap into, and accelerate the growth, and make connections between the two. >> Yeah, (indistinct) but when I, in back in real life, when we used to go to games, you walk into the stadium, you buy your ticket with your phone, you go to your seat, concessions guys, deliver things there for you, the fan experience, the players are there. I mean, why can't we have that in healthcare? I was just everything is happening, right. Go for good, yeah. And I think that's the Nirvana, hopefully soon. >> We're working on it. >> Good stuff. I know, I just love the vision, I think is so relevant and super important. Now, let's get into this health accelerator. What's this all about? Let's get into that. >> So, the health accelerator will be, a multi-week on-demand program. Where we're going to map high potential vetted startups, to a number of resources, right. I mentioned before that there will be mentorship, there will be technical experts who will be able to, take these startups who have established some presence, but we want to accelerate their ability to go deeper specifically into public health, throughout that ecosystem that I just described, right? Starting with providers and coordinators, payers, researchers, regulators. We want to give them a way to go deep into this, heavily regulated industry, so that they can not only have access to the innovation that many startups would not otherwise, like Manpreet mentioned machine learning AI, but they also have access to the resources, to ensure their success. >> What kind of problems are you guys trying to solve with this? I mean, is there a specific vetting process, is there a criteria? Is there a bar to all over share some specifics? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, for the past few years, a lot of the major change challenges, for our public health customers have been the same, but they require a new approach. And I like to call our approach the HIGH FIVE. So, some of those challenges that have been traditionally, lingering for the past few years, equal social determinants of health. Social determinants, when we talk about that, we not only refer to the nonclinical contributors to a person's overall wellness. So, you think about issues like food deserts or recidivism homelessness, all of that transportation to access to care, right, all of that contributes. But then there's also disparities and health outcomes. When you think about socioeconomic differences, rural health, ethnic and racial minorities, so, that all factors into social determinants of health. Then there's also aging. Now, these are the strategic pillars that we like to focus on, or that we are focusing on. When I mentioned aging every day in the U S, 10,000 people celebrate their 65th birthday. Many of those individuals are suffering from comorbidities, from hypertension, diabetes, cancer, and now the lingering impact of COVID-19. And so, as these aging individuals continue to live longer, the goal is to improve the quality of their life as well. And so, many of them look to technology to age independently at home, etcetera. So, that's our second strategic pillar. The third, is mental and behavioral health. So, when I talk about mental health, I mean, everything from mild depression, all the way through suicide prevention, and especially these days with COVID-19, we see a lot of clinicians suffering from burnout. And so, it's important, that we take care of the frontline workers, those healthcare providers, and even outside of COVID-19, you think about the ways that the patient population, has continued to expand, and the growth within the provider market has not, or the pool of providers has not nearly expanded at the same rate. We've got people living longer, we've got more people than ever insured. And so, we need to leverage technology to help a stagnant, number of providers to treat a growing pool of patients, without sacrificing the quality of care. And then finally, we've got environmental health. From air quality to water purity. It's important to understand the correlation between, the environment and the health care of our population. So, those are the pillars. I know I mentioned the HIGH FIVE, the fifth is not specific to healthcare. I touched on it a little bit earlier, but the fifth is, it is democratizing access to innovation, to resources, specifically for founders from underrepresented communities. >> And that's great insight, Michael great, great Schaeffer pointed that out. Manpreet take us on the final word here. Venture Capital, Startups, AWS, what's the current state share with us, the current worldview from your perspective. >> Oh, so, bringing home this point that MJ mentioned, the strategic plan of focus areas. And if you, look at all those strategic areas there's, you can really sort of put those into two buckets. One is the patient side of the bucket, and then there's the provider side of the bucket, or the caretaker side of the bucket. And if the patient side, what we want to do is work with startups that are, really working across a broad spectrum of use cases, but to solve those two key challenges of the, one on the patient's side and other on the provider side. Then the end goal of providing patient experience, and patient outcomes. For the patient side, it's the patient experience, patient engagement, patient outcomes. So, the startups looking on those sides, on those use cases of criteria. And then we have the provider side where, we want to ensure that the providers have the right set of technologies, the right set of solutions, right set of innovation, to help them where healthcare operations. You have all seen in COVID times, how the provider systems are getting overwhelmed. And that's where the healthcare operations comes into play. Clinical decision support. Now, many patients cannot get to the hospitals. So, how do we provide through our startup partners for startup customers, those solutions where remote diagnostics, remote imaging or remote health delivery could be provided. Things like predictive and prescriptive health solutions. How can we work with our startups to provide, those sort of solutions to the providers, to again, at the end, the better the outcome of the patients, right? So, that's what we were looking at. And that's what this program is all about. Working with public sector provider side of the house and the customers understanding, and helping them understand the need as well, and then bringing the right set of startup solutions, and help solve those challenges that they are facing, and the patients are facing as well. MJ, I'm sure you want to close it out, with some thoughts too. >> Okay. >> Absolutely, I would just close it with this, our goal, like Manpreet said, is to match the high potential startups, with the, the enterprises who are desiring those solutions, and success for us, we'll have three traits. It will be valuable, meaning that there will be a true alignment between what our startups offer and what the market needs. It will be measurable, so that we can quantify the improvement and outcomes. And finally, it will be sustainable. So, beyond COVID-19 beyond the opioid crisis, beyond any situation or condition, we look to bring solutions to market through our startups, that are going to truly sustain a transformative approach to modernizing public health enterprises. >> Great job again, and important work and DevOps, impacting healthcare in all kinds of ways. And it's super important work. I'm glad you guys are doing it, and it's going to develop out beautifully, and if I can give you a high five, Michael, I'll give you a high five off in-person, but remotely, >> Virtual. >> Get virtual high five great program. We're going to spread the word, good work. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for doing it, I appreciate it. >> Thank you very much for your time. >> Okay, it's theCUBE coverage virtual, we are theCUBE virtual bringing all the coverage, super important work being done in public sector, cloud enabling it, great people important, and of course, happening at re:Invent. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. >> Hello. Welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 not only are we there in person this year we're remote because of the pandemic and all that going on with the virtual event three weeks coverage here and special coverage of public sector. Got a great guest, Lorraine Bassett, Chief of Staff in Public Sector of Sandy Carter at AWS. Thanks for joining us. >> Hey John and thank you very much for the invitation. It's really good to be here. >> We've had great conversations with Sandy Carter and her team at awards program really just last year. Just a lot of success stories now with public sector and the pandemic. There's been just a lot of things going on where the technology has pulled you know from the future to present and the public sector needs it the most. This is a key thing. What's your role there? How are you working with Sandy and the team? Take a minute to explain what your background is and your current role. >> So I recently joined the Sandy Carter's team as a Chief of Staff and business advisor. And originally just before then let up the, the go-to-market strategy for the internet of things and Smart Seas in the public sector. So bringing that experience and expertise into Sandy's team and really being able to help provide guidance and advise where necessary. I think that's... it's going to add value to the core team. >> John: Yeah. And certainly there's just been a massive demand. We've been reporting on it really since February just the surge of just the acceleration of digital-- >> Oh yeah. >> Transformation in public sector across the board from education to military agencies just amazing. A lot of things going on here >> Yes. At re:Invent. Can you tell me more about this new services inception go-to-market team because this is new. Take me through explain. >> Yeah it is new and it's really timely and, and a really pivotal new service that we're adding in and well of the new service team that we're creating. So it's really focused on partners. So you know with it's really has a core objective to develop strategy and execute plans for the rollout of new priority services and features across AWS's Public Sector partner teams. So really the new inception the new services inception team its goal is to really be the connection point and the feedback loop for partners with our AWS service teams, our service go-to-market teams and our worldwide public sector teams. We really want to make that transition and that cycle as easy as possible. Ultimately, the new services inception team's objective is really we're going to be able to deliver AWS services to public sector partners and our customers by building connections between all of our services, all our service launches, our public sector partners. And I think really pivotal to this is in all GEOS regardless of the size of the partners and the types. So you know let me just close that out to say you know our strategy it's focused on new services not either in private or if the services in Pre-GA you know that resonate more so in the public sector. And really our goal overall role is to identify you know monetization paths enable them as necessary building marketing and go-to-market assets and helping evangelize the service and increase adoption. >> The number one question is going to ask is why now? What's behind this motivation? Can you just add some commentary to why now is it the pandemic? Is it all things coming together as that cloud scale? I mean what's, what's (laughs) what's the motivation. Why now? >> Well, we you know AWS you know we release we have a lot of new services that yeah and our partners need to have visibility into these services early and yes you're right. There's also been a lot of change and new demand that we hadn't seen before with you know really just in 2020 has been really interesting on the types of different new news cases that we're seeing. So you know we have new services that we want to be able to bring to markets. And so you know and our public sector partners it's long been part of our AWS be the program. So that's nothing new. So what this team is aiming to do is really formalize that process and the program to ensure that we're really maximizing participation from public sector partners. You know how do we do this? So how do we do this differently? It's really ensure that partners are aware of new services that are coming down the road that could impact business or impact their business heavily. >> Yeah. >> And work closely with them to identify the joint value proposition develop go-to-market content and provide value. And you're right John, right? This is, it's all of the above but and it's really how we enable customers based on everything that we've learned and what they need for 20 you know as we go into 2021. >> Okay. So there's the million dollar question. I'm a partner, pretend I'm a partner, what's in it for me? I'm I making more money? Am I got to to go faster? >> Oh yeah. >> What's the benefits to me as a partner? >> So this is you know there, there are... So you're right. There are a lot of really good benefits. So there's a couple that come to mind straight away. So let's just, let's just pull out kind of really what's going to be important to the customers... To the partners first. Right firstly, so being part of a formal better program enables faster market which should lead to market differentiation on launch. So this early release and early visibility and early position is really critical I think to our partners. Secondly, there's an ability to influence roadmap early on through our feedback cycle. So all of our partners who work with us know that we're, we're all about innovation. We need to hear what is going on with our customers or with our partners and what we need to do to improve So you know that feedback cycle is key. And thirdly, you know Dedicate you know as you launch and go to market, you will have access to or partners have access to dedicated launch specialist team. That's assigned specifically to work with you on those, on those new services. And lastly, access to technical and sales expertise the sales expertise that will really help drive go-to-market motions. But you know I just... It is I think more than that and is there, there is an ability to diversify revenue streams. There is an ability to upsell and cross sell based on key learnings. And really as we, as we grow and learn from the new services we can build new business models through go joint go-to-market planning you know and really just take in some of the key benefits that the, the new services that inception team can offer. >> So what's the requirements to get in? All partners is there a pre-recs? Is that a wait list? Can you just give in kind of quick detail on how it works and how do people engage? How do the partners engage with the program? >> Now that's a good question. So really any APN tier partner consulting and technology partner that is really willing to commit to working with us is committed to testing developing public sector, partner and customer references and providing regular feedback. I mean really this is all about innovation. So we don't want to be specific and narrow on the partners who want to drive these or want to be able to drive these new services. >> What does a successful launch look like when you have your partners engaged, things are happening, the service new service team comes in. What's it look like take us through what success looks like here? >> Well success. So I think if you just kind of work backwards from this success you know it's really it's in our culture to be customer obsessed. So really success is it's key to listen to our partners and customers to help us build what that successful model would look like. So there's two questions we'd come up with is what services do we engage? And what partners should we engage? And that will help maximize our ability to be successful. So that what services we engage is, is linked to what resonates most for the public sector ecosystem. Now and the customers. So it also is looking at the most pressing challenges that customers are facing and also how the new service can help unlock value. >> Yeah. >> So that's success around the services. Now success around partners is you know what partners to engage that is you know that is around determining the ideal partner profile for example for service. And we do that by looking at competencies, references, vertical focus, and the customer base. And so you know going back to your original question about what is success it really is a strong alignment with partners and the services that really maximize the you know the strength of our go to market together. >> All right thanks so much for explaining the new services inception go-to-market team and capabilities. Final question where can people learn more information and get engaged? Can you share any data on, on what can they do? >> So the fastest path is to engage with the account team AWS and our partner development managers. Then you know there you can learn to and how to participate in future new service launches and facilitate introductions you know between us you know between the new inceptions teams so that we can get to know you. >> Lorraine Bassett Chief of Staff for AWS Public Sector partners. Great to have you on looking forward to hearing more of how it's going with Sandy. I know there's a lot of growth. A lot of action happening >> Yeah. >> With the pandemic public sector has an awakening. They've realized that now's the best time to pivot all those years of living in the antiquated old world is now coming to fruition. >> Yeah. >> Thank you. >> Yeah this is a very exciting time. Thank you very much John. >> Yeah. >> Really appreciated. >> It's going to be massive change and it's super exciting. Public sector is going to be moving very, very fast. >> Yes. >> Thanks for coming I appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Okay so keeps coverage. I'm John Furrier. We are theCUBE virtual this year. We're not in person. This is part of AWS has been through all three weeks we've been here deep, doing deep dives, getting all the conversations. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Instructor: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. >> And welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. I'm John Furrier your host. This is theCUBE virtual. Special coverage of the public sector. Today Rebecca Wetherly, Director of Worldwide Public Sector System Integrator Partners for AWS. Great to see you. Welcome to theCUBE virtual. >> Thanks, John. I'm glad to be here. >> So just the news we've been covering all through re:Invented priors, just the growth in public sector. The acceleration with the pandemic, it's just that this acceleration has been massive. So I want to just get get your take. It's been hard but also, it's been an opportunity for partners. >> You leading the Integrators. >> Sure. >> They're on the front lines. I got to ask you, (chuckling) what is AWS doing to support their partners, as the business models are forced really upon them to move faster? >> Yeah, sure. Thank you. Let me start with saying that, companies are really building a business in partnering with us. Because of global needs such as the pandemic. But we also have many partners that are coming to us because of our customer demand outside of COVID. Because we're a leader in cloud innovation, and because we've got a global field engagement and go-to-market strategy. You know AWS is a customer driven company, and our partners are also our customers. We have a full suite of programs for our partners and whether they be a consulting partner or a technology partner. We have tens of thousands of partners all across the globe, with more than 35,000 new partners since January 2016. And in our public sector space, we have over 1,500 partners with solutions and experience, delivering on a combination of government, education, and nonprofit customer missions all around the world. Consulting partners are really professional services firms. That help customers of all types and sizes design, architect, build, migrate and manage workloads and applications on AWS. They accelerate the journey to the cloud for our customers. And they often are implementing technology solutions. As you referred to around COVID, that our technology partners are actually developing. So consulting partners are SIs that I work with, Strategic Consultant Partners, Managed Service Providers, and also resellers. And they are providing really great value to our customers by providing strategic advisory services, implementation and migration services, Staffog. They also have great specialty depth and machine learning or AI. IOT, data lakes and analytics. And even in things like communication tools using technologies like we're doing today on zoom, and taking those to our customers. Our technology partners on the other hand they deliver hardware, connectivity services and software solutions that are hosted or integrated with AWS cloud. And they deliver components to broad customer solutions, often via our consulting partners. We have a great, a great way of delivering technology through our AWS Marketplace and we'll talk about that in a minute. But I will say, that our tech partners are helping our customers decrease their deployment times, provide cost optimization and infrastructure for DevOps and production workloads. They're also lowering their costs on code development by using our broad portfolio of services. And oftentimes for our public sector customers they are helping shorten the path to achieving regulatory requirements for our public sector needs. >> That's awesome. You guys have a lot to do there to support your partners. Obviously the main concern is, how do I maintain that profitability in the fast pace. And then making sure that their customers can also transition and ride the digital transformation wave. So I have to ask you, what programs are you guys offering to help these partners succeed because certainly it's beyond just the profitability. it's this new business model of Cloud-scale. So what programs specifically are you guys offering? >> Yeah, we have a lot of different programs at AWS. The first stop is really the AWS Partner Network. Which I'll refer to as the APN. This is really our global partner program for technology and consulting businesses to leverage Amazon Web Services to build solutions and services for customers. The APN is the first place where companies can build, market, and sell their offerings, and provide valuable business, technical, and opportunities for marketing with their customers. Our programs provide promotional support. We provide visibility throughout our website. We give partners opportunities to engage with customers for events, social media. And we provide access to funding and go-to market opportunities. I touched on briefly our AWS Marketplace . And this is really a great program offering to our customers both consulting partners and technology partners. The AWS Marketplace simplifies procurement and entitlement of provisioning software across 50 different categories. And we have more than 8,000 transactional listings. That marketplace connects customers with more than 1,000 different ISBs or independent software vendors to help meet their business needs. And we have more than 300,000 customers using software from the AWS Marketplace. The Marketplace is also available on 24 different regions. So when a customer chooses to use the Marketplace they have the opportunity to procure their software from our consulting partners and leverage the software and the technology from our from our tech partners. Other really cool programs we have are our Partner Transformation Program or SaaS Factory Program, and also our Migration Acceleration Program. >> Awesome. Great programs. What else are you guys besides programs, Are you guys doing >> Yeah. >> to help partners succeed. Because I know there's a lot of touches, there's some new things going on. What else do you guys do? >> Yeah, I think we have a lot of great resources available to our partners. Most of our partners have Partner Development Managers that are working with them on a daily basis. Access to our business development and sales teams, solutions architects and other subject matter experts. Really getting deep into the technology and having access to those folks to help our partners design, build, architect and validate a purchase with customers. Also our Professional Services Teams.Right? They are deep subject matter experts that our partners have the ability to tap into. And then of course, because of the way we go to market in public sector, access and engagement with our capture, bid, and proposal teams are super important. We also have to consider access for our partners to be trained and become certified. That's a real requirement that our customers need to help them achieve their goals. We offer digital and classroom training for our partners to be able to learn at their own pace or via an AWS instructor. And AWS training and certification helps our partners build competence, confidence, and credibility with our customers. We also have AWS competencies. And our competency program is designed to identify, validate, and promote APN partners that have demonstrated technical expertise and proven customer success. One of the most critical competencies for us is and these days is around our migration. Migration competencies allows our partners to accelerate their customer's cloud adoption journey by providing strategy, personnel tools, education, and tech support to their customers. One of those customers and partners is InterVision. They're a consulting firm that provide strategic advisory services to organizations to help them run, grow, and transform their business needs with the cloud via modern IT services. Their experts have a deep history in technology solutions and they have a deep bench of certified engineers and data scientists to excel delivering Managed Services and Migration Services to both public sector and commercial customers. And with the California Department of Technology. Which is a state agency that provides authority and responsibility over all aspects of technology for California state governments, they selected InterVision to work with them due to their expertise and their proprietary offering called Cloud Migration Lifecycle Assurance. And that offering provided that CDT, the ability, pardon me. To take advantage of their Cloud Migration operations and optimization specialty. So our partners are really getting great opportunities to build their business and to accelerate their their work with us through a variety of programs, and by really digging deep and leveraging all of the programs that are available to them. >> It's nice with the mix of programs, plus the field support, plus the care they're nurtured that, grow that. As you know in these in these markets where you have partnerships and channels and relationships. You need to be profitable. And profitability is about happy customers. >> Rebecca: Sure. >> And margins.(chuckles) Making money. >> Rebecca: Yeah. Sure. >> You got to make money to stay in business. So, this is a big opportunity as the new economics of cloud come into the channel. This is really a big conversation. Moving fast, scaling up, new kinds of services. The integrators are really having a good time here. And these are new practices. How can someone learn more? What's out there? How does someone get engaged with you guys? What information can they, is there a site? Is there a program? How does someone get the resources? What would they do? >> Yeah. Well, I will tell you. The first stop is really our website. And that may sound trivial but that is the best place to get started for us. You're going to find there by visiting https://aws.amazon.com. You can register to become an AWS partner very easily. Right there you're going to get step-by-step instructions and learning paths, as well as tutorials and how to get your business up and running, and how to become a partner. And the journey largely looks like this. Right? One. get on board. Get familiar. Establish your relationship and join the Amazon Partner Network. Go through some very basic training and get familiar with their services. Second. Develop those technical and sales skills. Develop a business model where AWS lends the greatest value to your partner business. And as you move through the tiers of maturity, we will co-invest in your business to help you scale. And then three, really go to market. Establish the pathways to your customers. Build out your differentiated approach. Look at the competencies we offer and decide which ones are going to be the most relevant to you. We want you to leverage the funding mechanisms we have, and we want you also to think about how we co-market together. There are so many roads to success and AWS offers lots of different partner programs and opportunities to develop your unique roadmap John. >> Yeah, that's great enablement. That is super valuable. Having the co-funding, the go marketing, and the tools and the programs. All there to enable services to be successful. Rebecca, thanks for sharing that program. >> My pleasure. >> Great to have you on. Rebecca Wetherly, >> Thank you so much. Director of the Worldwide Public Sector System Integrator Partners. A big growing part of the public sector when we need it the most, which is now and it's growing. So check them out. Thanks for watching. This is theCUBE coverage. CUBE virtual, for AWS re:Invent reinvent public sector, special coverage. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCube, with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by, AWS Worldwide Public Sector. >> Okay, welcome back to theCube's coverage, of re:Invent 2020 virtual. It's theCube virtual, I'm John Farrow your host, we're here celebrating, the special coverage of public sector with Sandy Carter, vice president of AWS Public Sector Partners. She heads up the partner group within Public Sector, now in multiple for about a year now. Right Sandy, or so? >> Right, you got it, John. >> About a year? Congratulations, welcome back to theCube, >> Thank you. >> for reason- >> Always a pleasure to be here and what an exciting re:Invent right? >> It's been exciting, we've got wall-to-wall coverage, multiple sets, a lot of actions, virtual it's three weeks, we're not in person we have to do it remote this year. So when real life comes back, we'll bring the Cube back. But I want to take a minute to step back, take a minute to explain your role for the folks that are new to theCube virtual and what you're doing over there at Public Sector. Take a moment to introduce yourself to the new viewers. >> Well, welcome. theCube is phenomenal, and of course we love our new virtual re:Invent as well, as John said, my name is Sandy Carter and I'm vice president with our public sector partners group. So what does that mean? That means I get to work with thousands of partners globally covering exciting verticals like, space and healthcare, education, state and local government, federal government, and more. And what I get to do is, to help our partners learn more about AWS so that they can help our customers really be successful in the marketplace. >> What has been the most, exciting thing for you in the job? >> Well, you know, I love, wow, I love everything about it, but I think one of the things I love the most, is how we in Public Sector, really make technology have a meaningful impact on the world. So John, I get to work with partners like Orbis which is a non-profit they're fighting preventable blindness. They're a partner of ours. They've got something called CyberSec AI which enables us to use machine learning over 20 different machine learning algorithms to detect common eye diseases in seconds. So, you know, that purpose for me is so important. We also work with a partner called Twist Inc it's hard to say, but it just does a phenomenal job with AWS IoT and helps make water pumps, smart pumps. So they are in 7,300 remote locations around the world helping us with clean water. So for me that's probably the most exciting and meaningful part of the job that I have today. >> And it's so impactful because you guys really knew Amazon's business model has always been about enablement from startups to now up and running Public Sector; entities, agencies, education, healthcare, again, and even in spaces, this IoT in space. But you've been on the 100 partner tour over a 100 days. What did you learn, what are you hearing from partners now? What's the messages that you're hearing? >> Well, first of all, it was so exciting. I had a 100 different partner meetings in a 100 days because John, just like you, I missed going around the world and meeting in person. So I said, well, if I can't meet in person I will do a virtual tour and I talked to partners, in 68 different countries. So a couple of things I heard, one is a lot of love for our map program and that's our migration acceleration program. We now have funding available for partners as they assess migration, we can mobilize it and as they migrate it. And you may or may not know, but we have over twice the number of migration competency partners doing business in Public Sector this year, than we did last year. The second thing we heard was that, partners really love our marketing programs. We had some really nice success this year showcasing value for our customers with cyber security. And I love that because security is so important. Andy Jassy always talks about how her customers really have that as priority zeros. So we were able to work with a couple of different areas that we were very proud at and I loved that the partners were too. We did some repeatable solutions with our consulting partners. And then I think the third big takeaway that I saw was just our partners love the AWS technology. I heard a lot about AI and ML. We offered this new program called The Rapid Adoption Assistance Program. It's going global in 2021, and so we help partners brainstorm and envision what they could do with it. And then of course, 5G. 5G is ushering in, kind of a new era of new demand. And we going to to do a PartnerCast on all about 5G for partners in the first quarter. >> Okay, I'm going to put you on the spot. What are the three most talked about programs that you heard? >> Oh, wow, let's see. The three most talked about programs that I heard about, the first one was, is something I'm really excited about. It's called a Think Big for Small Business. It really focuses in on diverse partner groups and types. What it does is it provides just a little bit of extra boost to our small and medium businesses to help them get some of the benefits of our AWS partner program. So companies like MFT they're based down in South Africa it's a husband and wife team that focus on that Black Economic Empowerment rating and they use the program to get some of the go to market capability. So that's number one. Let's see, you said three. Okay, so number two would be our ProServe ready pilot. This helps to accelerate our partner activation and enablement and provides partners a way to get badged on the ProServe best practices get trained up and does opportunity matching. And I think a lot of partners were kind of buzzing about that program and wanting to know more about it. And then ,last but not least, the one that I think of probably really has impact to time to compliance it's called ATO or Authority to Operate and what we do is we help our partners, both technology partners and consulting partners get support for compliance framework. So FedRAMP, of course, we have over 129 solutions right now that are FedRAMPed but we also added John, PCI for financial HIPPA for healthcare, for public safety, IRS 1075 for international GDPR and of course for defense, aisle four, five and six, and CMMC. That program is amazing because it cuts the time to market and have cuts across and have and really steps partners through all of our best practices. I think those are the top three. >> Yeah, I've been like a broken record for the folks that don't know all my interviews I've done with Public Sector over the years. The last one is interesting and I think that's a secret sauce that you guys have done, the compliance piece, being an entrepreneur and starting companies that first three steps in a cloud of dust momentum the flywheel to get going. It's always the hardest and getting the certification if you don't have the resources, it's time consuming. I think you guys really cracked the code on that. I really want to call that out 'cause that's I think really super valuable for the folks that pay attention to and of course sales enablement through the program. So great stuff. Now, given that's all cool, (hands claps) the question I have and I hear all the time is, okay, I'm involved I got a lot of pressure pandemic has forced me to rethink I don't have a lot of IT I don't have a big budget I always complaint but not anymore. Mandate is move fast, get built out, leverage the cloud. Okay, I want to get going. What's the best ways for me to grow with Public Sector? How do I do that if I'm a customer, I really want to... I won't say take a shortcut because there's probably no shortage. How do I throttle up? Quickly, what's your take on that? >> Well, John, first I want to give one star that came to us from a Twilio. They had interviewed a ton of companies and they found that there was more digital transformation since March since when the pandemic started to now than in the last five years. So that just blew me away. And I know all of our partners are looking to see how they can really grow based on that. So if you're a consulting partner, one of the things that we say to help you grow is we've already done some integrations and if you can take advantage of those that can speed up your time to market. So I know know this one, the VMware Cloud on AWS. what a powerful integration, it provides protection of skillsets to your customer, increases your time to market because now VMware, vSphere, VSAN is all on AWS. So it's the same user interface and it really helps to reduce costs. And there's another integration that I think really helps which is Amazon connect one of our fastest growing areas because it's a ML AI, breads solution to help with call centers. It's been integrated with Salesforce but the Service Cloud and the Sales Cloud. So how powerful is that this integrated customer workflow? So I think both of those are really interesting for our consulting partners. >> That's a great point. In fact, well, that's the big part of the story here at re:Invent. These three weeks has been the integration. Salesforce as you mentioned connect has been huge and partner- >> Huge >> so just just great success again, I've seen great momentum. People are seeing their jobs being saved, they're saving lives. People are pretty excited and it's certainly a lot of work you've done in healthcare and education two big areas of activity which is really hard corporation, really, really hard. So congratulations on that and great work. Great to see you, I going to ask you one final question. What's the big message for your customers watching as they prepare for 2021 real life is coming back vaccines on the horizon. We're hearing some good news a lot of great cloud help there. What's your message to send to 2021? >> 2021, for our partners for 2021, one, there is a tremendous growth ahead and tremendous value that our partners have added. And that's both on the mission side, which both Theresa and I discussed during our sessions as well as technology. So I think first messages is, there's lots of growth ahead and a lot of ways that we can add value. Second is, all of those programs and initiatives, there's so much help out there for partners. So look for how you could really accelerate using some of those areas on your customer journey as you're going along. And then finally, I just want John, everybody to know , that we love our partners and AWS is there to help you every step of the way. And if you need anything at all obviously reach out to your PDM or your account manager or you're always welcome to reach out to me. And my final message is just, thank you, through so many different things that have happened in 2020, our partners have come through amazingly with passion with value and just with persistence, never stopping. So thank you to all of our partners out there who've really added so much value to our customers. >> And Amazon is recognizing the leadership of partners in the work you're doing. Your leadership session was awesome for the folks who missed it, check it out on demand. Thank you very much, Sandy for coming on the sharing the update. >> Thank you, John, and great to see all your partners out there. >> Okay, this is theCube virtual covering AWS re:Invent 2020 virtual three weeks, wall-to-wall coverage. A lot of videos ,check out all the videos on demand the leadership sessions, theCube videos and of course the Public Sector video on demand. Micro-site with theCube. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCube with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. >> Hi, and welcome to theCube Virtual in our coverage of AWS re:Invent. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Today we are joined by Shawn Snyder. She is the managing director at Deloitte and Cloud Migration market leader. Thanks for coming on the show Shawn. >> Thank you, Rebecca. I'm glad to be here. >> So we're talking today about cloud migration in the public sector in the COVID era, but I want to start by having you introduce yourself to our viewers tell them a little bit about what you do at Deloitte. >> Sure, I'm Shawn Snyder. I'm a managing director based out of Atlanta. I lead our cloud migration offering for our government and public sector clients. So that really means that I serve clients in the government, both public sector local government agencies, as well as federal agencies and helping them move to the cloud, and I'm also responsible for building out our capabilities, our tools, our resources, and people to help clients do that in a very fast and accelerated way. >> So even putting aside the pandemic for a second, shifting to the cloud is such a big and daunting undertaking for so many organizations, including federal agencies. How do you help CIOs and clients think through the processes and what they need to do and how they need to do it? >> Yeah, I mean, it all starts with where are they at on this journey, right? We actually have a show our clients like a typical journey to the cloud and, you know, we have a method and set of tools that we can work with them depending on where they are but if they're just in the initial stages of exploring, moving to cloud, it typically starts with a strategy and really understanding what, you know, how engaged is the mission and the agencies in supporting this. Are they really looking to continue to build their own talent? What is the end state look like? Do they want to build cloud skills and cloud engineering skills within their organization, or are they looking to do more of a managed service model? So a lot of these conversations happen and also around what platforms they want to use and then we typically look at their portfolio of applications. So it could be, you know, they're looking to move out of a data center and go more to a cloud virtual environment. It could be that they're looking to move a couple of mission critical applications that are highly complex with lots of data and sensitive information, so. It really kind of depends on what they're trying to achieve and what is the business result that they're looking to gain. >> And how do you help them think through the business case for this? Because I know that that is definitely an imperative. >> So we take a couple of, I can give you an example. So when we were working with a state in local agency, looking at a big mission critical integrated eligibility system, they wanted to be able to move because they were, the technology was getting a little dated. It was eating inflexible to maintain and when they were looking at the maintenance costs that they were spending on both the infrastructure and the application, it was starting to, you know, take up to 90% of the budget and so the lack of ability to be able to do new capabilities and new innovation when you're talking about especially post COVID, which I know we haven't gotten into, but when they're looking, there's actually more and more products and aid that's being made available. So they need more flexibility, and so what we did was we actually did a bunch of analysis around what does that technology stack look like? What's the cost drivers and then we built out what the future would look like on the, in this particular case was the AWS platform. How could they take advantage of some native services and reduce some of their licensing costs? How could they upgrade through our products? We have a seamless way to upgrade to cloud suitable operating systems. So in this case, they were on an outdated Windows and Linux platforms. We were able to update that to cloud suitable, which allowed them to, you know, save a lot of money in terms of their infrastructure costs to maintain some of that outdated infrastructure and then we get them on end state tools around security monitoring, around infrastructure monitoring and so they can really streamline some of those infrastructure costs as they are spending tremendous amount of money just on the tools when they're managing all of that on-prem, on a complex system. >> So thinking about now we are in this pandemic, which has changed everything about the way we live and the way we work, moving to the cloud was a business goal. Something that a lot of organizations sort of had, in they're two and three year, two and five-year plan. Now it is an absolute mandate. What are you seeing? What are you hearing? What are organizations saying to you now? >> There's just such a, there's such a demand for speed and doing it at scale very fast. So prior to COVID, like you said, it was a multi-year journey. We'll get to it when we can, but there were other priorities that automatic, always got in the way of that and also just the cost justification, right? When you're talking about migration and a lot of times these systems that's portfolio systems are outdated, they're not cloud suitable. So how do you have to refactor them? That can get pretty costly pretty quickly. Now our clients want to move fast and they have a virtual work workforce, they need more scale. They need more storage for some of the data. They need to be able to integrate with other partners, especially in the healthcare space, whether it's at the state and local agency level or in the federal space, that ability to create that ecosystem of being able to transmit and share data in a very secure way at a very large volume is becoming, you know, mission critical with combating COVID with being able to protect our citizens. >> Speed is the name of the game, as you're saying. So what, how is Deloitte investing in automation and what kinds of migration accelerators are you bringing to clients now? >> So a few different things. One, we are partnering with AWS, both on a professional services perspective, as well as with some programs. So we've integrated our methodologies and we've been certified by AWS for our methodology around migration acceleration program. So that's the map because of our qualifications of the amount of migrations we do globally, as well as our methodology and tool set, we're able to offer this joint map program, which allows us to team with AWS. Go on site in quickly use our tools to diagnose what applications are actually at cloud ready to move, how fast can they move? And it gives a lot of information around technical configurations, what servers they reside on, and all of basically the affinities, all of the information you would need to be able to move those applications and if it's not cloud suitable, we can detect if it, how quickly we could get it cloud suitable. What would need to be done is an application code, or is it database, or is it operating system? What are those things that need to get upgraded to move it to the cloud? And is it worth moving to the cloud? So we actually look at the business value that each of these applications are providing and saying, you know, this might be more suited to stay on-prem for now. So we work with them through this map program to really come up with that detailed migration schedule and plan and we then use that information that we collected during that diagnostic phase feeds into our migration tools. So the migration is actually automated with the information that was collected during the diagnostics and the landing zones, and all of the sizing of the infrastructures able to be sized appropriately based on the information that was collected. >> I want to ask you about innovation. In a lot of these Cube Virtual conversations that we're having, we're hearing from a lot of executives that the pandemic has been a forcing mechanism in sort of forcing people to think more resourcefully, more ingenuitively about how they solve these pressing problems. What have you experienced, and have you seen in particular examples of innovation that have been inspiring and exciting for you? >> Yes, absolutely. So I actually work in the federal health space most, and our ability to be able to stand up an application or a service, whether it's a Salesforce service, the AWS platform, but we've been able to stand up contact tracing for local agencies, for state agencies. We've been able to set up cloud native services that allow the data that's getting collected across these different organizations to be able to make meaningful information using machine learning and some of the other native services that are available within cloud and they can be stood up very quickly and very cost-effectively and I think that's the other value that cloud is unlocking for organizations and really now starting to realize that they can move towards innovation and start to spend much more money on innovation than what they were doing previously on spending most of the budget on maintenance. >> When you're talking to clients now about the future, what are they thinking? What's on their minds in this sort of this 12 to 24 month plan? Are they just thinking we just need to get through this next period and cope with this uncertainty? Or are they thinking about the future. >> Moving to cloud isn't just an infrastructure move. I think that's getting your head around what does it mean? What does your workforce have to look like? What does, how do you collaborate with the business? What are the, what is the future innovation use cases? What is going to, how do you actually start to use those use cases to demonstrate early value and start to do things much more in an agile and iterative way instead of, you know, delivering something in a, you know, several months or years. So it, it really is shifting, it's a transformation for how the office of the CIO or how they actually operate. It's creating integrated teams within the CIO organization. We're actually embedding different disciplines like engineering, infrastructure, IT operations, security operations, risk management, financial management, these disciplines as part of these, what we call DevOps DevSecOps type teams, and be able to deliver an end-to-end product on a particular platform in a very agile way. >> In thinking about the future of the workforce and how the pandemic is changing people's careers. I know that you serve as the technology campus champion at Georgia Tech, and you're very active in recruiting bright young business talent. Can you talk to our viewers a little bit about the changes that you foresee in terms of how people plan their careers and their professional development and anything in particular that Deloitte is doing to make sure that the pandemic does not have such a damaging effect, you know, from a lot of statistics that women are dropping out of the workforce in large numbers. >> Yes, so let me unpack your question a couple of ways. So, you know, first of all, you know, I'm really passionate about talent development and recruiting, and I've learned recruiting efforts at the undergrad for many, many years, and I've always been a technologist. So now, like just seeing how technology is embedded in all of the business that we do and it's so mission critical, you now, I'm very focused on making sure there's more women and more minorities going into technology oriented degrees. There's so much you can do with a technology degree and the of career careers that are available, you know, are unlimited. We can't hire enough people that have the right skills. There's just a war on talent for people that have the right security and cybersecurity skills, cloud engineering skills, and just the analytical skills. I mean, this is very complex stuff that you're trying to, you know, build stuff and create stuff that hasn't been created before. So I find it extremely fascinating and I hope that people can see the creative side of things and the scientific it's really bringing it both together and that's what I try to mentor a lot of the recruits on campus. In addition to that, so I think that there's tremendous amount of opportunity for folks going into those types of degrees, as well as for women I, you know, it's been a challenge because people are, you know, some schools aren't closed are not open. If you have a dual working family, it can be a big challenge if you're taking care of children or elderly parents, for example. So at Deloitte, we actually recently implemented a dependent care policy for folks that could take advantage of additional stipend to subsidize, you know, childcare or dependent care. So that's helped a little bit, we're also really focused on diversity inclusion. So, you know, really having candid conversations, individual conversations around what are your boundaries at work right now? Can, do you have to be off right now from, you know, dinner time till bedtime? What does that look like? And we're trying to really help people have the tools and feel comfortable about having those conversations, 'cause it's not just women, it's men, too. I mean, this, these are difficult situations that we're all, you know, co living with our spouses and our significant others and our children, and potentially, you know, extended family members and trying to work in the same environment and is very challenging, and so we're trying to create space for people to be able to have those conversations and make it work for them. >> Don't I know it's Shawn. So just in terms of thinking about the future and what is next for Deloitte, and you've just talked about how you are a technologist at heart, and you see so much excitement about bringing in different disciplines, different functions to solve these urgent and pressing problems. What do you foresee for yourself and for Deloitte over these next couple of years, as we emerge hopefully out of this crisis situation. >> I think Deloitte, you know, one reason I've stayed at Deloitte for so long is that we've always been really focused on how does the technology solve the business problem, the mission problem? And so we have a real opportunity to continue to be able to bring the IT and the technology enablement and make sure it aligns to the business strategy and so the business use cases, you know, we've invested a lot in our labs Capabilities where we're able to bring different disciplines, whether it's, you know, HR and talent thinking about workforce of the future, you know, that technology stack and the architects together, as well as the thinking about across the ecosystem, what are some of the future use cases that you're not even thinking about? So we're able to bring a lot of these different disciplines or subject matter experts together. Now I'll be in a very virtual way, but we've been able to take these lab concepts and it really helps kind of get that out of the possible defined and really strong alignment across these different constituents across the enterprise. So that is really exciting to me. I also think the investment that we're making in our cloud engineering practice, in our alliances with companies like AWS, it really gives us insight into where the technology is going and making sure our staff and our tools and our resources available to us are aligned to that more than investments are being made in the technology. >> So well Shawn thank you so much for coming on theCube Virtual. It's a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you very much Rebecca. >> I'm Rebecca Knight stay tuned for more of theCube Virtual's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. >> Welcome to theCUBE Virtual and our coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, the specialized programming for Worldwide Public Sector. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm joined by Nick Speece the chief federal technologist for Snowflake. Nick, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. >> Likewise, chief federal technologist, that's the first time I've ever heard of that title. Tell me a little bit about that. >> It's probably the last time you'll hear it. So chief federal technologist is really somebody in the company who is focused on bringing the needs of the federal government back to our corporate headquarters, making sure that the product as it's developed and evolves has the federal requirements in mind. >> Excellent. So the last couple of months for Snowflake big, biggest software IPO and software history your market cap right now is at 66 billion 515 data workloads running on Snowflake's platform every day 250 petabytes of data under management, a lot is going on. Let's talk about Snowflake. You guys operate only in the cloud, why was that decision made and how does that impact businesses analysis of data? >> Yeah, so great question and the answer is actually in the opening that you gave for us and thank you for that reinforcement. Snowflake can't exist anywhere, but the cloud. Technology over the last five to 10 years has really seen a move from what the cloud originally was, which was I have a virtual machine in my data center, I'm going to run it on your stuff not mine, into more comprehensive service offerings like Snowflake. We can't reach the kind of scale that Snowflake operates at every day and that our customers demand without the technology of clouds like AWS. The technology has to be there, the underlying and underpinning architecture has to be there, otherwise our customers get left in the dark and we can't can't have that. >> And especially today as data volumes are massively increasing and we know that that's only going to go up. We know that IT is only going to be more complex but when we talk to businesses in any industry the value of the data is in the insights the ability to extract that data in real time glean insights from it so that businesses can make data-based decisions that pivot their business, especially critical during the year that we have now known as 2020. Talk to me a little bit about though digging into your marketing material, everyone, there's all these terms, right, that everyone uses and you guys use single source of truth. What does it actually mean for single source, for stuff like? >> Yeah, so we talk about cloud, we talk about single source of truth and when you're looking at data problems, the problem and the solution are the same thing. A massive amount of data is a raw resource, that's all it is. And trying to refine that raw resource into something that is insightful or something that is useful to a business process is a challenge that every customer in every market, in every region undergoes. And how you overcome that is critical. And one of the primary focuses of Snowflake is to evolve the data cloud. Snowflake platform is the underlying technology for the data cloud but the data cloud is where we're going. And what I mean by data cloud. If you have a data set, your internal data, that is your truth, but it might not be the truth. So in Snowflake we encourage our customers to collaborate on data sets. For example, if you want to know how many people are living in a certain borough in New York City you could go around with a clicker and count everyone, or you could just ask the Census Bureau. That's the nature of the data cloud and what we're talking about here. Going to the subject matter experts who have the data that you need, using our marketplace, using our private exchanges, using our data sharing to build your own data cloud and become part of the next gen architecture for data sharing and collaboration, to get to the source of the truth, to make better decisions, to gain better insights. It's great to combine your data with enrich data from other sources, especially when it comes to making federal decisions and governance decisions. >> Absolutely that's critical. That the biggest challenge customers have is being able to sort through all that and find. I like how you put this as their single source of truth. Can you give us some examples of some federal agencies maybe even just anonymously that are using the power of Snowflake to do just that? >> Absolutely. We've got customers in the healthcare space and in some of the law enforcement spaces and especially in public education that are trying to increase the awareness of the folks that are subscribing to their services, for example, folks that are looking for healthcare help. If you're filing claims for a certain healthcare providers or certain care facilities, we want to make sure that those claims that are forwarded to those entities are legitimate, first of all, for example, if you're filing a claim for knee surgery in Florida, you probably didn't have one in California, three hours later. So those kinds of enforcement activities, and not just trying to do audits but also to benefit everybody who's receiving care. There's a lot of push now about genetic sequencing, DNA and RNA vaccination is huge with COVID-19, getting access to massive amounts of data to do analysis against and figure out the best approach, that's critical for where we go in the next 10 to 15 years in healthcare. Snowflake is very, very honored and happy to be propelling that move in the healthcare space. >> It is that's going to be absolutely critical but we're also seeing it, you know, everywhere else, such as for universities and education, suddenly this need, the last few months for real-time learning. Talk to me about data analysis. Can Snowflake help companies, you talked about enriching data sets so not just companies sources of data but additional data sets that they can add in and evaluate and analyze to make great decisions, but from a historical real-time perspective, talk to me how Snowflake helps with that data analysis. >> Yeah, sure. Right. So Snowflake in and of itself can do some analysis work. We've got some great visualization tools in our new UI that was released recently on public preview. So there's some analysis tools built into Snowflake but really where the value comes from is in taking your tools that you already use today and connecting it to a data source or platform that can wrangle that data, that can move that data through automated pipelines to give you a model view of that data that's beneficial. For example, data scientists and data engineers spend 80% of their time, and I know a lot of statistics are made up on the spot, that was not a promise, but trying to move this data through and refine it and build features to get to the point where you can ask a question is 80% of these very valuable professionals time. Shortening those timelines is what Snowflake really aims to do in the analysis space. We're not trying to replace the analysis tools that you use today, we work fine with all of them. The big difference is presenting them with enough data volume to give you real insights and eliminate bias as much as we can in data sets. >> What are some of the things that differentiates Snowflake from data warehouses and other folks in the market? >> Yeah. Great question. The big difference is Snowflake was built natively for the cloud. We weren't adapted to the cloud, we didn't adopt the cloud at some point in the future, Snowflake was built from scratch to be in the cloud. And since this is the appropriate show to mention it the primary difference between us is we were built to use object storage foundationally underneath our technology. And I know that sounds really nerdy and it is, but it adds a tremendous amount of value. If you think about how we used to collaborate 10 years ago we'd have a spreadsheet that if I open that spreadsheet for my share drive and you tried to open it at the same time, you'd get locked out. You're told you couldn't have it. And if tradition stays true I would probably be on vacation for two weeks. Contrast that now with the massive Google Doc platform and Office 365, object storage has changed the way that we collaborate on the same kinds of documents. Multiple people interacting with one thing at one time without contention, that's the reason why Snowflake has to operate in the cloud. We bring that same paradigm, multiple actors on a single object and give you that source of truth the truth that you absolutely need to make decisions. >> And that's critical these days as we know. We're in living in uncertain times and one of the things I think we can expect is the uncertainty to continue, but also for many industries people to stay remote or some big percentage for quite a while. So the ability to have those collaboration tools and be able to collaborate in real time is table stakes for so many companies. But when we're talking about some of the things going on this year, security, we can't not talk about security. You know, all these folks from home accessing corporate networks, you know, maybe not through VPNs or behind firewalls, the cloud is paramount to that. How does Snowflake address the security issue? >> Absolutely. So I'll start by saying our security is inherited from the wonderful security platform that AWS has underneath it. So we inherit all the security around data storage the EC Compute, all of the different entities and end points that AWS already secures Snowflake takes the same precautions. More than that, we've also built and rolled this access control to ensure that people are getting access only to the data that they should be getting access to, we recently implemented data masking as well, so certain roles are not able to see unmasked data, but they can still do queries that use the underlying data to filter. So there's a lot of different capabilities built in, encryption at rest, encryption in flight, AES-256 encryption keys used in a hierarchial model. These are phenomenal security architectures that are paramount to the security of the folks that are using our platform. Because we know at the end of the day the first day we have a leak in Snowflake is probably our last day in business. We got to be good at that which is why it's our top priority. >> I didn't, to ever talk about security as an inherited, I must be a dominant trait if we're going to be talking about, you know, genetics and chromosomes and mRNA and things like that. So walk me through last question, a government organization, or say they're an AWS customer or they want to start using Snowflake, what's that process? How do they go about doing that to leverage those inherited security capabilities that you talked about? >> Well, thankfully AWS has helped us put a FedRAMP moderate certified Snowflake region together in AWS, East commercial, so we're very happy to have a FedRAMP moderate region. They can access Snowflake through the AWS Marketplace or from Snowflake.com, you can start a trial in just a couple of minutes. Our security is built into all of our regions although the FedRAMP regions are specialized in some of the encryption technology we use, but we always, always always protect our users' data, regardless of where it is. >> You make it sound easy, I got to say. (laughing) >> That's because it is. (laughing) Thank you cloud. >> That's good. And well, that's good and it should be, especially because there's so much complexity and uncertainty everywhere else in the world right now. Last question for you. As I mentioned in the beginning, the biggest IPO in software history, just a couple of months ago during probably one of the most strangest time of any of us have ever, and our relatives ever witnessed, what can we expect from Snowflake in 2021? Are you going to bring all the good vibes that we all need? (laughing) >> Well, good vibes is our business model. You know, Snowflake is a phenomenal platform. We've had a ton of success driven by the success of our cloud provider partners, driven by the success of our wonderful customers. We have over 4,000 people using Snowflake now to great effect. You can look for more features, you can look for more functions, but really the evolution of the data cloud, our big push is to help our customers get into the data cloud, get the truth out of their data and make better decisions every day. And you'll see more of that from us as time continues. >> One more question I wanted to sneak in, how did you work with those customers to evolve the data cloud? What's that feedback loop like? >> It's, a lot of it comes down to silos that the customers have built up over years and years and years of operation. That's the first step. In Snowflake there isn't such thing really as a data silo there's data put into Snowflake, everything is unified, you can do queries across databases, that's the first thing. The second thing is browsing our data marketplace. It's just like an App Store for your phone but instead it's data sets and the data sets are published by the experts who know that material better than anyone. I mentioned earlier bringing in everything from housing evaluation data to COVID-19 data from California and Boston, bringing World Health Organization data, John Hopkins University data, joining that with the data that you already use today along with weather and population counts, the main thing here, the strategy is almost endless. More and more data sets are being published over every day. We have over a hundred contributors in the marketplace now. >> That's exciting that we have the technology and the power like this to help the world re, you know, recover from such a crazy time. It's nice to know that, that there was the power of that behind that, and the smart folks like you chief federal technologists, helping to fine tune that and really ensure that organizations across the government can maximize the value of data and find their single source of truth. Nick, it's been a blast having you on theCUBE. Thank you for joining me. >> Thank you for having me. >> For next piece, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Virtual. (upbeat music)

>> from Bahrain. It's the Q recovery AWS Public sector Bahrain brought to you by Amazon Web service is >> welcome to the cues conversation here. You're in Bahrain for Amazon Webster, is this summit our second summit? Um, here. Big news. Amazon Web services announced the availability of the region in the Middle East. I'm here with the chief of Public Sector Theresa Cross and vice President of Worldwide Public Sector. This is a huge milestone. This event one just in terms of the event. The interest across multiple countries in the region. Yes. And you have a new region with multiple availability zones? Yes, up and running. Congratulations. >> Hey, we launched the confetti today and yes, we're open for business and we do. It's a hyper scale region with three available the zones and lots of activity already here in the delays. But it really is a substantial kind of milestone because we started this sometime back in the Middle East, was one of the top regions around the world requested by our partners and customers. And now here we are. >> We've been talking with you for many, many years and I love interviewing you, but this one to me feels like it's not the weight off your shoulders. It's you're at the start line of another marathon. You've achieved so much with this because what's the first thing about Bart Rainey? We've reported on this on Select Angle and our other sites is that you get a lot of work here, is not just turning on a region. There's a lot of government commitment cloud first, full modernization, fintech banking systems, a full re platforming of a government and society and Amazons powering a lot of it and causing a lot of economic growth. So this is a big deal. >> It really is a big deal because, like you said, it really is about digital transformation here. And when I met the crown Prince in 2014 we had this conversation about really creating the economy here in a different way because Bob terrain itself, it's not oil rich country, but a smaller country with lots and lots of tourism. But in this region, while we haven't based here in Bahrain, this is truly a Middle East GCC region and but But part of that, the reason to start it here in my reign was that they really did take a lead in government transformation. As you heard them say, they're going all in shake Some on today talked about government is moving really fast, and they actually did the hard work to think about their telecommunications industry, their government regulations. They started with cloud first, and then they created all the write regulations to make this happen. So it is kind of phenomenal how quickly, in some ways, you know, feel slower than we'd like, But it's really moving quite fast. >> It's pretty fast. You should get a lot of kudos for that. I think you will. But I think to me what's interesting. The news here is that there is a balance between regulation and innovation going on, and regulation can be hampering innovation, some cases and not enough regulation. You have a Facebook situation or >> right so >> it's a balance. These guys have done it right. But to me, the tell sign is the fintech community, >> because that's where >> the money is. The central bank and then the ABC bank are all talking about a pea eye's all in with Amazon that's gonna create an ecosystem for innovation. Startups, et cetera. >> It totally isn't you heard Thean Vivid Jewel from ABC Bank today talk about their platform. What they're doing with clouds and the reason they chose a DBS was because we had this region of Bob Terrain, and they wanted to move quickly in. The regulations now have been updated in a way that actually allows them to do their banking applications in the lab. There's also a startup accelerator here, Fintech May, and they're doing a tenant work with new types of financial applications. So it's so exciting to see this kind of happening than the lace for I think a lot of people thought it would be much slower. We have a ways to go. It's still day one, for sure, but all the building blocks are getting there in the right place to really make this happen. >> You know, 80. Jessie's quoting the announcement you guys had just a couple weeks ago. Laura Angel And in July, the clouds of chance unlocked digital transmission. Middle East, says Andy chassis. Obviously unlocking is a key word because now you have customers from startups to large enterprises and ecosystem of a P M party. So the Ap N Group is here. Yes, So you have global I SUV's here and knew I s V's. You got the government and the education and to me, the news of the show. To me at least maybe it's not the big news, but is that you guys? They're offering a computer like a cloud computing degree. Yeah, for the first time about that news, >> you are right in terms of kind of every sector's picking at, but like in most places around the world, this is not unique. We need skills, and we've got to make sure that we're teaching the skills, working backwards from what the employer needs, like a TVs. So what? We've been here. We announced today we're launching our first cloud computing degree at the university of our terrain, and they're kind of thing. That's really unusual, John. They're going to do a phase one where they offer a cloud certification starting in early 2021 every program at the University of Bahrain, Whether you're in finance or banking, or business or health care or law, you can do this cloud computing certification, which gets you going and helps you understand how you last cloud in your business and then in the fall will be announcing the four year starting, the four year cloud computing degree, and that is in conjunction with our A DBS Educate program. And it will be all the right cloud skills that are needed to be successful. >> Talk about the demographics in this country because one of the things that's coming up is when I talk people in the doorways and it's a chance to talk to some local folks last night that that all in an Amazon, the theme is this. This younger generation yes, is here, and they have different expectations. They all want to work hard. They don't want to just sit back on their laurels and rest on their on their location. Here. They want to build companies they want to change. This is a key factor in the bottle rain modernization. Is that >> Yeah, generation well, all across the Middle East. The thing that's unique about the mill aces, the very young population you had millions of gamers across the Middle East as an example that comic con and Saudi like two years ago on that was one of the most popular things was fortnight. As soon as the region got at all the different gaming started taking place. But we want to create a culture of builders here, and the way you do that is what you said, John putting it into their hands, allowing these young people have the tools create a startup became entrepreneur, but they need to have access to these tools. And sometimes capital is often not that easy to get. So they want to make sure that the capital that they're given or that they have, whether it's bootstrap capital or venture capital, fending or whatever friends and family, they want to make sure that they can use that capital to the greatest advantage to build that company out. And I truly believe that this is gonna help them having an eight of us cloud region. I mean, you saw. Today we have 36 companies that launched their offering in the region on the day we actually announced so that they had specific offerings for the Middle East, which pretty exciting. I mean, that's a lot on day one. >> I mean, it's still day. One of you guys always say, but literally day one they were launching Yeah, I wanted to comment if you could just share some insights. I know, Um, your passion for, you know, entrepreneurship. You guys are also some skill development investing a lot of women in tech power panel this morning, there's major change going on. You guys were providing a lot of incentives, a lot of mentoring, this internships in conjunction with by rain. There's a lot of good things. Share some of the new things that you're working on, maybe deals you're talking about doing or >> way announced Thio kind of new things today. One is we have our we partake program, which I'm, of course, super passionate about. And that is about preventing tech learning and skills to women and underserved in representative communities. So we announced three other training programs here across the Middle East time. So those were put up today and you'll continue to see its role more and more of those out. And the other thing we did yesterday we announced a internship program with the minister of Youth here in Bahrain. That was shaped Nassir, who's a very famous He's that King san, and he's a very famous sportsmen. He does. He just won the Ironman Ironman and 2016. It was the world champion. He does endurance horse racing, so he's a He's a someone that the youth look at to here, and so he's doing all these programs. So we announced a partnership that were the first group doing the internship with this youth program, and so we're very excited. We're going to start that small and scale it, but we want to get these young people quickly and kind of get them excited. But here, what they focus on it is underrepresented communities. So it fits so nicely in with what we're doing with our attack. So you have both Oliver training our over 400 online courses that we offer with a dubious education academy. Now degree now our internship program and we protect. So, John, we're just getting going. I'm not saying that this is all will offer, but these are the things that were getting going with, and we need to make sure we also Taylor things like this Ministry of Youth program and sports at to the region in terms of water, their local needs, and we'll make sure that we're always looking >> at the entrance. Just just get him some great experience. Yes, so they can earn and feel good about themselves. This is kind of a key, exactly thing not just getting an internship, >> and it's, I think, locally it will be about teaching them to do that, disagree and commit really have that backbone to build that company and ask all those hard questions. So we're really going to try to indoctrinate them into the Amazon a TVs culture so we can help them be entrepreneurs like we are every day. >> And you got the data center, you got the city, the centers, you get the regions up and running, and architect, it perfectly suits up with people in it. Are you going to staff that with local talent, or is it gonna be Amazonian is coming in? What's the makeup of staff gonna be? What's the >> story? I mean, our goal is to hire as many local talent. We everywhere we go around the world. We want to get local talent because you can't yet if we did, First of all, we don't have enough people in our headquarters to bring folks in here, so we really have to train and educate. But locally, we have an office open here by rain. We haven't Office Open and Dubai and one down Saudi, and that is local talent. I mean, we are trying to use as much local talent and will continue to create that. And that's kind of the point. Jonas talking about the degree working backwards from what the employer needs. We want to give input because we think we also are getting good. Yeah, so we need to get the top. But we need those other individual employers that keep telling us we need more cloud skills to give that input. But, yeah, >> we're going to get a degree, migrate them into the job >> market, right quick like >> and educates. Been doing great. I learned a lot. This is a whole opportunity for people who want to make money, get a job. Amazon Web service is >> It's a place you could either work for us. Work for someone now, like even the government has a >> virus. Make a person tomorrow >> there. Yet >> we had one, >> but the point of being a builder, what we're seeing more and more John are these companies and government entities are building their talent internally. They're not outsourcing everything anymore, and the whole culture at being a builder, not just outsourcing all that. And that's what eight of us really helps all these entities. D'oh is moved quicker by having kind of some in house talent and not outsourcing everything to slow you down. That >> really thank ABC pointed that out beautifully in his point was, Hey, I'm gonna you know, I'm all in on AWS. We have domain expertise, We have data. That's our intellectual property. We're going to use that and be competitive and partner. And >> yes, and the new models it is. And that I p stays in house with that company or entity or government organization. It was so fun for me today to hear Shake some on from Maggie. A talk about the government is moving fast, and I think that's an example of a really are they figured out clown helps him just go a lot faster and save many security. >> I'm glad you brought that up. I know you got a short time here, but I want one last point in. We've been talking a lot about modernization of government, your success with C i a United States jet I contract still under consideration. All this going on you're experiencing by ranges and, um, unbelievable, fast moving government. They kind of get it. United States some places gets it. This is really about focusing in on the workloads. What have you learned? As you've been engaging these modernization efforts with governments summer slow, some of political ramifications behind. No one wants to lose. Old guard will hold onto the rails. We've seen that in the news, but this is coming fast. What are you learning? What do you >> take away its leadership? I mean, at the end of the day, all these things were driven by a very strong leaders. And even you can see everybody today on stage. It is leaders that make a decision that they wanted a faster and they want to modernize but have the capabilities. No matter if you're the U. S. Department of Defense. Ah, yes. Health and human resource is National Health Service in the UK or RG a hearing by rain, the government's or enterprises that we work with around the world. The key is leadership. And if there's that leader that is really strong and says we're moving, did you actually see organizations move a lot faster if you see people kind of waffle anger. I'm not sure, you know, that's when you can see the slowness. Wow, What I will tell you is from the early days of starting this business in 2010 the individuals that always move fastest for the mission owners because the mission owners of whatever the business West at a governmental level or enterprise, they said, we need to keep our mission going. So that's the reason they wanted to walk through this transformation. >> And now, I think, with developers coming in and started to see these employees for these companies saying, No, no, what's the reason why we can't go fast? That's right now a groundswell of pressure you see in both government, public sector and commercial. >> And you saw Mark Allen today on stage talking about security. It iss literally day. Zero thing for us, and the reason a lot of our customers are meeting faster now is because of security. Cloud is more secure in their meeting to the cloud for security because they feel like they could both optimize, move faster for workloads, and now they have security. Better, faster, cheaper security, bad design, >> Theresa always pleasure thinking coming. Spending time. Thank >> you for coming to Barbara Ryan. Thank you. So >> we're going global with you guys is seeing the global expansion 20 to 22nd region. 69 availabilities owns nine more coming. More regions. More easy. You guys doing great. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Secure. We are here in Bahrain. Form or coverage. Global coverage of the cube with Reese Carlson, vice president of worldwide public sector. She's running the show doing a great job. We're here more after the stroke break. Stay with us.

>> Announcer: Live from Washington D.C. it's The Cube covering AWS Public Sector Summit, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to The Cube's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector summit here in our nation's capitol, I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Co-hosting alongside analyst John Furrier. We are welcoming today Troy Bertram. He is the GM Public Business Development Worldwide Public Sector at AWS. Thanks so much for coming on The Cube, Troy >> Thanks for having me Rebecca >> Rebecca: A first timer. >> It is the first time. >> Rebecca: Welcome. >> Yes, thank you John, thank you Rebecca. >> Let's talk about your partner organization. Why don't you let our viewers know how it's structured, what its mission is, how it works. >> Yes, certainly. Our public sector partner teams work with our partners around the world that really support the mission requirements of government, education, and non-profits. Our partners are part of the large Amazon partner network, so 35,000 plus partners, but really our customers choose, Whether it's technology partners that have really focused their SaaS, PaaS, ISV solutions on government customers and worked through accreditations and certifications, or it's the consulting partners that go to market and own the prime contract vehicles. Contracts are how our customers buy in public sector. What we've done is really focused our teams from start-ups, and venture capitalists, and incubators, through technology, ISVs, PaaS and SaaS partners to our large consulting partners; global consulting partners, but also really helping curate those consulting partners that meet socioeconomic requirements. Often times governments have laws, regulations to buy small woman owned 8(a), service disabled veteran, as veteran, one of my near and dear partner subset to me, and we work with them to help navigate through and develop programs to work through the APN, and often times it's a partner to partner activity of a consulting partner working with a specialized ISV technology solution that can meet a customer's mission requirements. >> What's interesting about the cloud, we've been talking about our intro this morning is the agility and government's now seeing it benefits, and it's not just and aha moment anymore cloud is really, it's driving a lot of change. That's been lifting up a lot of your partner profiles. You have start-ups to large entities all playing together because the requirements my change based upon either the agency or the public sector entity. >> Yes. >> Have unique needs, so you have a broad range of partners. How do you guys nurture that? That's good diversity. You have nice solution set from tech to business. How do you guys nurture that? What's some of the challenges and opportunities you guys are seeing with the growth. >> Cloud is really allowed a reset for many of our partners. Whether you are born in the cloud company, that doesn't necessarily have a long legacy, and haven't built an entire infrastructure, and you don't have an infrastructure of people, but also don't have technology debt that you've been burdened with because of your prior operating models. It's nurturing that born in the cloud company that maybe a services oriented migration partner that's focused on moving our customers applications and workloads, or it's nurturing the technology and helping them build, or it's a refactor and a legacy on premise solution or those solution providers that have traditionally operated in an on-prem environment. Helping them train, certify, and really build a new practice. >> And it's exciting too. You got the ecosystem kind of approach where, you know a thousand flowers can bloom. I've got to ask you, what do you see sprouting up? What's growing most? What is some of the trends that you see in the partner ecosystem? What's growing fast? What's the demand? What's the hot area? >> The real demand is for people with skill sets. In our business, skill sets also often include security clearances, and a knowledge of the working environment that they're migrating from. We're spending an inordinate amount training and educating. Also, our partner selling community of understanding the dynamics of how to go to market, and the contract vehicles, and how to navigate. The opportunities are really immense. It's nurturing those thousand flowers, and it is a challenge for many of us. How do we nurture those thousand flowers simultaneously? >> Are you finding the right people? A big theme on The Cube here is the skills gap. I just saw a Deloitte survey. 60% of executives, and these are executives, they're not in the public sector, said a skills gap hindered their AI initiatives and hindering their cloud computing initiatives. What are you seeing? What are you hearing from the people you're talking to? >> There's a thirst for both knowledge and training, but there's also, from the executive side, we have a need to fill. There's an abundance of roles, and all of us working together. One of our initiatives is even the job boards that we're working with our educate team and Ken Eisner a peer that leads that is, we're helping our partners promote their open roles. Allowing our partners to look for and curate the same talent that Amazon is helping train and develop because when our partners can find amazing talent, our customers win. It benefits AWS and the partner ecosystem. >> Education's huge. You got to have the ongoing digital course ware. Is that a top priority for you? What are some of your top goals for this year in your plan? >> When it comes to education, top goal is training many of our new partners through our emerging partner team. Many of the new partners have a commercial practice. We're also looking at those partners and actively recruiting those partners that have built a commercial practice that are looking to enter government. Whether it's our distributors or our resellers that own the prime contract vehicles, we're doing partner to partner activities. We call it partner speed dating. It's contract vehicles that exist across state and local government, US federal, or in the international community for those ISVs that want to enter new market regions is pairing with those existing local companies that have contract vehicles and then helping train and educate on the nuances of public sector. >> We were talking with General Keith Alexander and retired General Yesthidae came on and I asked them directly, if you could a magic wand, I think I said, something along the lines of if you had a magic wand, what would you do to change the government? It could go faster. He said the technology check we're doing very well, it's moving along great, it's the procurement process. It's just too long. He mentioned contracts. This is really the key point we keep hearing. The red tape. What's the update there? I'm sure partners aren't wanting more red tape. They want to cut through it, to your point. >> No. It's really an education process. When I started at Amazon over six and a half years ago, my first role was to stand up, and it still is the core of my role, I have individuals in 22 different countries around the world, and we're helping governments and VR partners through the procurement process. We did this past week in my home state of Minnesota, our 10,000th RFX, so we consider an FRP, FRI, an RFQ a tender, I need to buy, I want to buy something. We responded to 10,000 of those in six years and two months. That's an abundance of contract that ultimately, many of them are task orders and IDIQs and GWAX. There's an abundance of pathways as General Alexander stated for customers to buy the technology. Now it's educating the contracting officers, the COs, the KOs, around the world on the existing pathways and how to leverage them. We still see old procurement methodologies being applied to the cloud, and it does slow down the end customer's mission requirements. >> And the path to value. >> Yes, the path to value. Exactly. They want to move and move fast and contracts is how we buy, but it's also what slows us down. >> You know, you're with Amazon six years plus, so you know this, so the speeds of value's been the key thing for the cloud. As you look at success now with Amazon public sector, not only in the US, but abroad and internationally, you got massive tailwinds on the success. The growth is phenomenal. How does that feel? What's some observations? What's some learnings that you can take away from the past few years and where's it going? >> It feels like it's day one. It does feel like it's day one. There are tailwinds, but there's still an abundance of customer requirements, and they're evolving, and they're more complex. I personally really like my career's been public sector. Solving the mission requirements, whether it's helping a forward deployed airman, soldier, really keeping them at the cutting edge of technology, and out of harms way, or our first responders; some of the new product demonstrations that we've seen of evolving technology that's helping a firefighter see from an aerial drone vehicle. What does it look like on the other side of this building, and how can I now communicate across different agencies? Is phenomenal. In my home state, where Army Futures Command, I live in Austin, Texas. Army Futures Command is working with the state of Texas as well as the University of Texas to really collaborate as we've never seen before. The barriers of emerging technology to legacy government, to ministries, and health defenses around the world, ministries of defense, and health agencies around the world. >> The data, the scale of Amazon cloud is going to to make that possible. Ground Station's a great example of how that's growing like a weed. The DOD has got a great charter around using agility and AI. >> Collaboration, which is so critical too, as you said. >> It is, and our VM Ware partnership with VM Ware on AWS can really help, and that's a partner play. That's partners helping migrate using the co-developed technology to really move and move faster. Use those existing apps and vacate those data centers. >> Well, thanks for coming on The Cube. Got to be a quick plug, plug the organization, share with the audience, what you're looking for, and update on the partner network. Give a quick plug for your group. >> What we're really looking for is, we've got 105 different competency partners that have really invested in their government, their education, their non-profit competency, and we want to help. I personally want to help them promote their business, and what the opportunity is to connect to either other partners or to government mission requirements. Really welcome the opportunity, John, to come on and look forward to seeing my partners on The Cube in the future. Thank you. >> Well, Troy Bertram, you are now a Cube alum, >> A Cube alum >> Thank you. (panel laughing) >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier, you are watching The Cube, stay tuned for more AWS Public Sector Summit.

>> Announcer: Live from Washington D.C., it's the CUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its partner, Ecosystem. >> Well, welcome back to the CUBE here. We are live in Washington D.C., day two of our coverage here at the AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Again, in Washington D.C., just about a mile and a half or so, about a mile from the White House, conveniently located here in our nation's capitol with John Furrier. I'm John Walls. John, good morning to you, sir. >> Good morning, great day yesterday. A lot of great interviews, thought leaders, inspirational, very informational. And again, the CUBE just doing its thing, our inaugural event, here at Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit. Our first time here, this is the seventh year of the show. Started out as just a kind of gathering, people coming together. >> Kind of a hope for a gathering too, right? We heard yesterday, guys, "Boy, I hope somebody shows up." Well, we have 10,000 showing up now, so. >> It's still small, but that's a huge number. Some big companies don't even get that many for their annual user customer conference in general. So, 10,000 is certainly a good number. I expect Amazon to continue to blow away their performance and the numbers. I expect this show to be, again, the Amazon re:Invent, which is their big show, as a company. Amazon, which was a re:Invent, which is held in Las Vegas every year and overseas. But this going to be the public sector version: education, government, health, all these different public sector opportunities are ripe for the cloud. And that's really the big story. >> You know, and I think we saw that on the keynotes this morning with Theresa Carlson who's the Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector here for AWS. But she brought out a number of guests, John Edwards being the most prominent, the CIO of the CIA, but also Representative for the Australian Tax Office, Representative for the Ocean Conservancy. She talked about state and local governments. So you hit the nail on the head. We think public sector, I think maybe the presumption is go right to big government. But there are a lot of tentacles, if you will, out there or a lot of segments out there. 22 thousand non-profits, for example, that AWS is now working with. State, local, and federal governments. So they've cast a wide net, and they've caught a lot of fish. >> I mean, yeah, I mean to me this is an interesting time in our lives. What's the famous quote? We live in interesting times? We are living in interesting times, certainly in Washington D.C. here we are feeling it. Obviously, coming from California, I always love to come into D.C. to feel what it's like into the boiling water with Trump in the office and all the disarray in the government. There's a shooting of a Congressman this morning, 50 shots fired at a softball practice. It's insane. And so, there's also change going on at the technology level, but that's changing government and also roles of education and whatnot. So you have this really kind of weird environment like all the evidence of the frog in boiling water. At some point, it doesn't know it's being boiled to death, but that's been the public sector for generations. Really, I think the seminal changeover was mainframes and minicomputers really kind of powered the government, and I think it's been incremental changes. And you've seen IT become what we've seen in the enterprise: an incremental improvement and bolting on some support. Here, we've got wireless. And so, it's kind of moving the ball down the field yard by yard, no major long ball throws to the endzone as we say in football. But now with the cloud, you have an opportunity to take the domain expertise of all the different agencies because they want to do a good job. Their world is changing. You can look no farther than education, higher ed, and even K through 12. I mean, they're dealing with an audience that's grown up with cell phones, mobile phones, smartphones. I mean, they're not phones anymore. They're computers that happen to make phone calls, and half the kids don't even make phone calls anymore, so. >> That's right, half are you kidding? >> It's not even a phone anymore. It's a computer, a camera. >> It's a texting device. >> User experiences are driving this, and it's a forcing function. So all this disarray, all this opportunity, the perfect storm of innovation happening. And I think the cloud enables that. And I think that's part of the reason why Amazon Web Services is, again, feeling the love here because the growth is right there in front of them. >> Now, we're going to have Theresa Carlson on a little bit later on, but I want to just get your take on her. She's taken this from an infancy stage and has just walked it, absolutely, she's amazing. >> Theresa Carlson, we'll have her on. She's been on the CUBE multiple times. We always joke with her when she comes on the CUBE when we're at re:Invent and other places we see her when she comes on. "Hey, we should come to your conference." And so, we're here. But the thing about Theresa Carlson is, she's loved by all of the customers today, and she's very customer-focused. But she's tenacious. She is smart. She's beautiful. She's a hustler. She's great. So she is a great leader, and she's been knocking on doors in this town for years when cloud wasn't cloud yet. And you know, when you're an innovator, pioneer, the door slams in your face, right? So, you know, you've got to have that kind of tenacity to stay on it, and that's what she's done. She's been amazing. I'm a real big fan of hers. I mean, I think she's got some work to do, areas I think that she's got to really expand and go faster with Ecosystem. Some of the case studies are out there to be had. We know for a fact, I mean, and they talked on stage, but there's a lot of smart cities, things going on. There's a ton of transformative Amazon Web Services deals happening, so you want to see more of those, want to see more of them faster. I want to see more peer review. I want to see more case studies. So to me, that's where I think she's going to have to really keep the hustle going and then get her team cut out, set the bar high and continue to innovate. >> You know, we talked about that seminal moment with the CIA deal four years ago when the CIA made the move, went to AWS, chose them over IBM. John Edwards was talking about that mindshift at the agency today, saying, it was our goal as we looked at all of our partners, instead of making you or them become like us, we wanted to become like them. We wanted to be faster. We wanted to be more agile. We wanted to be more nimble. We wanted to be more open in a way or at least open to new ideas. And so, it was a transformational shift in their paradigm that really sent them on a great course. He couldn't have been more positive on that stage today talking about AWS and the relationship with the CIA and what they have done for the agency, what it's done for the agency. >> Look, there's a frustration in public sector. It's the elephant in the room, so to speak. And that is, they want to do more with less because that's always been their role. Now, some kind of say, "Oh yeah, "a bolted contractor kind of bids." And you know, the procurement process which old school was, you know, the $45 bolt that the joke in D.C. is for these big government and, you know, Army contracts. But they still get scrutinized on costs. So, you know, there's been a way of doing things that are changing, right? So how you procure technology, how you deploy it, is really different now. And the opportunity is to get this in the hands of people who want to move fast. They want to actually deliver a good product. There's a lot of great people in public sector who love their job, and if they don't give them the tools, you're going to see what I call a brain drain go on in public service. And you're seeing that going on, obviously with Trump and the government here. There are a lot of smart people saying, "Hey, I'm out of here." Right? It always kind of happens during political changeovers, but no more than the passion of the people working. Just give them the tools for the job, alright? That's kind of the cloud mojo. It's like give them, move fast, give them the technology they need. And a lot of stuff we're hearing from friends is one of our guests yesterday, they need some of the basic stuff automated away. I want the compliance. I want the security. I want to make sure that I can run the operations at scale. And that's really the table stakes. And that's going to be the tipping point, when all those details around compliance can just be programmed in once and just work. That's when you're going to start to see some real acceleration, new apps, new developers, new environments for whether it's students, federal workers, or practitioners in health and human services, you're going to start to see those things happen. >> Well, it's all about stability, right? It's the stability and certainty and knowing that what I'm doing is okay. Right? That I'm staying within the confines, the regulations, you know, this town knows regulations. >> All of these markets, you know, what's going on in those worlds? And a lot of people ask questions. People in the industry, they know what's going on, and they want better, faster, cheaper, now. And I think that's Amazon's ethos. I mean, Jeff Bezos, the CEO, is living large right now, stock prices at thousands and his personal cash to send people to space and build up Mars, for instance. That's his moon shot. It's not his moon shot, it's his Mars shot. So, he's got a grand vision. He loves space. But he's always said the ethos of Amazon, which Amazon Web Services is part of Amazon, is lower prices for customers, constantly deliver lower prices, push the prices lower, and ship product faster. >> That's true. >> Get it in the hands faster on the delivery side. So you could apply that ethos to anything. It's really a timeless ethos. It's not pegged on one division. Andy Jassy and Theresa Carlson, they picked that up. They're trying to drive the prices down. CIA talks about that. And delivering faster means speed. I want faster drives. I want lower prices. And they've delivered that. Amazon has consistently delivered better product at a lower price and working on shipping software faster, better performance. You know, delivering here is packets. So, there it is. That's really why Amazon is winning. That's the key to their success. >> Well, it's been a winning formula, for sure, and we'll be talking about that much more today as we continue our coverage here from Washington D.C. We are live here on the CUBE. We continue with more from AWS Public Sector Summit 2017 right after this.