(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AWS reinvent 2020, the virtual edition. I'm Lisa Martin. I have a couple of guests joining me next to talk about AWS and Druva. From Druva, Chris White is here, the chief revenue officer. Hey Chris, nice to have you on the program. >> Excellent, thanks Lisa. Excited to be here. >> And from AWS Sabina Joseph joins us. She is the general manager of the Americas technology partners. Sabina, welcome. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> So looking forward to talking to you guys unfortunately, we can't be together in a very loud space in Las Vegas, so this will have to do but I'm excited to be able to talk to you guys today. So Chris, we're going to start with you, Druva and AWS have a longstanding partnership. Talk to us about that and some of the evolution that's going on there. >> Absolutely, yeah. we certainly have, we had a great long-term partnership. I'm excited to talk to everybody about it today and be here with Sabina and you Lisa as well. So, we actually re architect our entire environment on AWS, 100% on AWS back in 2013. That enables us to not only innovate back in 2013, but continue to innovate today and in the future, right. It gives us flexibility on a 100% platform to bring that to our customers, to our partners, and to the market out there, right? In doing so, we're delivering on data protection, disaster recovery, e-discovery, and ransomware protection, right? All of that's being leveraged on the AWS platform as I said, and that allows uniqueness from a standpoint of resiliency, protection, flexibility, and really future-proofing the environment, not only today, but in the future. And over this time AWS has been an outstanding partner for Druva. >> Excellent Chris, thank you. Sabina, you lead the America's technology partners as we mentioned, Druva is an AWS advanced technology partner. Talk to us from through AWS lens on the Druva AWS partnership and from your perspective as well. >> Sure, Lisa. So I've had the privilege of working with Druva since 2014 and it has been an amazing journey over the last six and a half years. You know, overall, when we work with partners on technical solutions, we have to talk in a better architect, their solution for AWS, but also take their feedback on our features and capabilities that our mutual customers want to see. So for example, Druva has actually provided feedback to AWS on performance, usability, enhancements, security, posture and suggestions on additional features and functionality that we could have on AWS snowball edge, AWS dynamoDB and other services in fact. And in the same way, we provide feedback to Druva, we provide recommendations and it really is a unique process of exposing our partners to AWS best practices. When customers use Druva, they are benefiting from the AWS recommended best practices for data durability, security and compliance. And our engineering teams work very closely together. We collaborate, we have regular meetings, and that really sets the foundation for a very strong solution for our mutual customers. >> So it sounds very symbiotic. And as you talked about that engineering collaboration and the collaboration across all levels. So now let's talk about some of the things that you're helping customers to do as we are all navigating a very different environment this year. Chris, talk to us about how Druva is helping customers navigate some of those big challenges you talked about ransomware for example, this massive pivot to remote workforce. Chris (mumbles) got going on there. >> Yeah, absolutely. So the, one of the things that we've seen consistently, right, it's been customers are looking for simplicity. Customers are looking for cost-effective solutions, and then you couple that with the ability to do that all on a single platform, that's what the combination of Druva and AWS does together, right? And as you mentioned, Lisa, you've got work from home. That's increased right with the unfortunate events going across the globe over the last almost 12 months now, nine months now. Increased ransomware that threats, right? The bad actors tend to take advantage of these situations unfortunately, and you've got to be working with partners like AWS like Druva, coming together, to build that barrier against the bad actors out there. So, right. We've got double layer of protection based on the partnership with AWS. And then if you look at the rising concerns around governance, right? The complexity of government, if you look at Japan adding some increased complexity to governance, you look at what's going on across, but across the globe across the pond with GDPR, number of different areas around compliance and governance that allows us to better report upon that. We built the right solution to support the migration of these customers. And everything I just talked about is just accelerated the need for folks to migrate to the cloud, migrate to AWS, migrate to leveraging, through the solutions. And there's no better time to partner with Druva and AWS, just because of that. >> Something we're all talking about. And every key segment we're doing, this acceleration of digital transformation and customers really having to make quick decisions and pivot their businesses over and over again to get from survival to thriving mode. Sabina talk to us about how Druva and AWS align on key customer use cases especially in these turbulent times. >> Yeah, so, for us as you said Lisa, right. When we start working with partners, we really focus on making sure that we are aligned on those customer use cases. And from the very first discussions, we want to ensure that feedback mechanisms are in place to help us understand and improve the services and the solutions. Chris has, he mentioned migrations, right? And we have customers who are migrating their applications to AWS and really want to move the data into the cloud. And you know what? This is not a simple problem because there's large amounts of data. And the customer has limited bandwidth Druva of course as they have always been, is an early adopter of AWS snowball edge and has worked closely with us to provide a solution where customers can just order a snowball edge directly from AWS. It gets shipped to them, they turn it on, they connect it to the network, and just start backing up their data to the snowball edge. And then once they are done, they can just pack it up, ship it back. And then all of this data gets loaded into the Druva solution on AWS. And then you also, those customers who are running applications locally on AWS Outposts, Druva was once again, an early adopter. In fact, last reinvent, they actually tested out AWS Outposts and they were one of the first launch partners. Once again, further expanding the data protection options they provide to our mutual customers. >> Well, as that landscape changes so dramatically it's imperative that customers have data center workloads, AWS workloads, cloud workloads, endpoints, protected especially as people scattered, right, in the last few months. And also, as we talked about the ransomware rise, Chris, I saw on Druva's website, one ransomware attack every 11 seconds. And so, now you've got to be able to help customers recover and have that resiliency, right. Cause it's not about, are we going to get hit? It's a matter of when, how does Druva help facilitate that resiliency? >> Yeah, now that's a great point Lisa. and as you look at our joint customer base, we've got thousands of joint customers together and we continue to see positive business impact because of that. And it's to your point, it's not if it's when you get hit and it's ultimately you've got to be prepared to recover in order to do that. And based on the security levels that we jointly have, based on our architecture and also the benefits of the architecture within AWS, we've got a double layer of defense up there that most companies just can't offer today. So, if we look at that from an example standpoint, right, transitioning offer specific use case of ransomware but really look at a cast media companies, right? One of the largest media companies out there across the globe, 400 radio stations, 800 TV stations, over a hundred thousand podcasts, over 4,000 or 5,000 streams happening on an annual basis, very active and candidly very public, which freaks the target. They really came to us for three key things, right? And they looked for reduced complexity, really reducing their workload internally from a backup and recovery standpoint, really to simplify that backup environment. And they started with Druva, really focused on the end points. How do we protect and manage the end points from a data protection standpoint, ultimately, the cost savings that they saw, the efficiency they saw, they ended up moving on and doing key workloads, right? So data protection, data center workloads that they were backing up and protecting. This all came from a great partnership and relationship from AWS as well. And as we continued to simplify that environment, it allowed them to expand their partnership with AWS. So not only was it a win for the customer, we helped solve those business problems for them. Ultimately, they got a (mumbles) benefit from both Druva and AWS and that partnership. So, we continue to see that partnership accelerate and evolve to go really look at the entire platform and where we can help them, in addition to AWS services that they're offering. >> And that was... It sounds like them going to cloud data production, was that an acceleration of their cloud strategy that they then had to accelerate even further during the last nine months, Chris? >> Yeah, well, the good news for cast is that at least from a backup and recovery standpoint, they've been ahead of the curve, right? They were one of those customers that was proactive, in driving on their cloud journey, and proactive and driving beyond the work from home. It did change the dynamics on how they work and how they act from a work from home standpoint, but they were already set up. So then they didn't really skip a beat as they continue to drive that. But overall, to your point, Lisa, we've seen an increase and acceleration and companies really moving towards the cloud, right. Which is why that migration strategy, joint migration strategy, that Sabina talked about is so important because it really has accelerated. And in some companies, this has become the safety net for them, in some ways their DR Strategy, to shift to the cloud, that maybe they weren't looking to do until maybe 2022 or 2023, it's all been accelerated. >> Everything's, but we have like whiplash on the acceleration going on. >> Sabina, talk to us about some of those joint successes through AWS's lens, a couple of customers, you're going to talk about the University of Manchester, and the Queensland Brain Institute, dig into those for us. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I thank Chris sharing those stories there. So the two that kind of come into my mind is a University of Manchester. They have nearly 7,000 academic staff and researchers and they're, part of their digital transformation strategy was adopting VMware cloud on AWS. And the University actually chose Druva, to back up 160 plus virtual machine images, because Druva provided a simple and secure cloud-based backup solution. And in fact, saved them 50% of their data protection costs. Another one is Queensland Brain Institute, which has over 400 researchers who really worked on brain diseases and really finding therapeutic solutions for these brain diseases. As you can imagine, this research generates terabytes critical data that they not only needed protected, but they also wanted to collaborate and get access to this data continuously. They chose Druva and now using Druva solution, they can back up over 1200 plus research papers, residing on their devices, providing global and also reliable access 24 by seven. And I do want to mention, Lisa, right? The pandemic has changed all of humanity as we know it, right? Until we can all find a solution to this. And we've also together had to work to adjust what can we do to work effectively together? We've actually together with Druva shifted all of our day-to-day activities, 200% virtual. And we, but despite all of that, we've maintained regular cadence for our review business and technical roadmap updates and other regular activities. And if I may mention this, right, last month we AWS actually launched the digital workplace competency, clearly enabling customers to find specialized solutions around remote work and secure remote work and Druva, even though we are all in this virtual environment today, Druva was one of the launch partners for this competency. And it was a great fit given the solution that they have to enable the remote work environments securely, and also providing an end-to-end digital workplace in the cloud. >> That's absolutely critical because that's been one of the biggest challenges I think that we've all been through as well as, you know trying to go, do I live at work or do I work from home? I'm not sure some of the days, but being able to have that continuity and you know, your customers being able to access their data at 24 by seven, as you said, because there's no point in mapping up your data, if you can't recover it but being able to allow the continuation of the relationship that you have. I want to move on now to some of the announcements. Chris, you mentioned actually Sabina you did, when you were talking about the University of Manchester, the VMware ready certification Chris, Druva just announced a couple of things there. Talk to us about that. >> Thank you. Yeah, Lisa you're right. There's been a ton of great announcements over the past several months and throughout this entire fiscal year. To be in this touch base on a couple of them around the AWS digital workplace, we absolutely have certification on AWS around VMware cloud, both on AWS and Dell EMC, through AWS. In addition to continuing to drive innovation because of this unique partnership around powerful security encryption and overall security benefits across the board. So that includes AWS gov cloud. That includes HIPAA compliance, includes FedRAMP, as well as SOC two type two, certifications as well and protection there. So we're going to continue to drive that innovation. We just recently announced as well that we now have data protection for Kubernetes, 100% cloud offering, right? One of the most active and growing workloads around data, around orchestration platform, right? So, doing that with AWS, some of my opening comments back when we built this 100% AWS, that allows us to continue to innovate and be nimble and meet the needs of customers. So whether that be VMware workloads NAS workloads, new workloads, like Kubernetes we're always going to be well positioned to address those, not only over time, but on the front end. And as these emerging technologies come out the nimbleness of our joint partnership just continues to be demonstrated there. >> And Sabina, I know that AWS has a working backwards approach. Talk to me about how you use that to accomplish all of the things that Chris and you both described over the last six, seven plus years. >> Yes, so the working backwards process we use it internally when we build our own services, but we also worked through it with our partners, right? It's about putting the customers first, aligning on those use cases. And it all goes back to our Amazon leadership principle on customer obsession, focusing on the customer experience, making sure that we have mechanisms in place, to have feedback from the customers and operate that into our services solutions and also with our partners. Well, one of the nice things about Druva since I've been working with them since 2014 is their focus on customer obsession. Through this process, we've developed great relationship, Druva, together with our service team, building solutions that deliver value by providing a full Saas service for customers, who want to protect their data, not only in AWS, but also in a hybrid architecture model on premises. And this is really critical to us cause our customers want us to work with Druva, to solve the pain points, creating a completely maybe a new customer experience, right. That makes them happy. And ultimately what we have found together with Druva, is I think Chris would agree with this, is that when we focus on our mutual customers, it leads to a very longterm successful partnership as we have today with Druva. >> It sounds like you talked about that feedback loop in the beginning from customers, but it sounds like that's really intertwined the entire relationship. And certainly from what you guys described in terms of the evolution, the customer successes, and all of the things that have been announced recently, a lot of stuff going on. So we'll let you guys get back to work. We appreciate your time, Chris. Thank you for joining me today. For Chris white and Sabina Joseph, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE. (soft music fades)

from around the globe it's the cube with digital coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat welcome back this is the cubes coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 I'm Stu minimun and it's our seventh year doing the cube this year of course it is a digital event which means we are reaching all the community members where they are around the globe really excited to bring program first time guests and a first time to redhead summit Vachon Vora he's the chief technology officer of Vodafone idea joining me from Mumbai India bhishan nice to see you take so much for joining us it's a pleasure to be here as >> I'm looking forward to this interaction all right so as I said I've been at Red Hat show for many years the the telecommunications space you know service providers are some of the you know more interesting in the technology space you talk about scale you talk about change you talk about you know software eating the world all of those discussions are ones I've had for many years but you know I think many people know Vodafone may be a vote a fun idea escape for us you know the organisation and of course you've got the CTO at so you know what that means inside your organization sure so what a fun idea is a company that came came to acclaim as a result of a merger about 18 months ago so the number two and number three operators in India which was Vodafone an idea came together to create a telco serving over 300 million subscribers and we've been integrating the the networks over the last 18 months and consolidating and doing one of the largest integration in the world of two networks comprising over 200 thousand sites and carrying you know more than 50 billion MB of traffic per hour per day serving more than 40 million voltaic customers and we have been duplicating the network very very busy with her and we taken down so far almost a hundred thousand base stations which is equivalent to the size of a large operator in us so that's about the carnahan that is about the scale of the the operator that word of an idea is and what we've been busy with for the last day yeah well well Besant of course the reason we're doing this event online is because right now with the global pandemic the vast majority of the population they're at home so you know healthcare of course you know one of the major concerns I actually have done interviews with some of the power and energy companies critically important at this time but you know telecommunications you know what one of the top of the list you know in normal times for what people need but today it's the the only way that we can all connect it so tell us a little bit about do you know what the current situation you know the impact and importance this really highlights of your business yeah so just as the rest of the world India is also in a lockdown and India actually has one of the largest the largest lockdown in the world putting all 1.3 billion people in a lockdown yeah across the entire country so within that context the telecom network is crucial to make sure that the life goes on the essential services are delivered the industry continues to still operate as the best it can and all of that is made possible because of a stable and reliable network that we offer so a huge huge impact on the society always has been but in in this current context it is even more more critical and crucial so what we do is we make sure that we are the invisible layer you talked about health healthcare workers and emergency services well we are the invisible essential service that probably many people don't see but we are the ones who are really helping this country survive this this crisis and so far we have seen 25 30% increase in traffic in a single day in one week we experienced the same amount of traffic growth we would have experienced in the entire year so we we scalability is very very critical in our network and we've been able to keep up with that kind of a growth and continue to serve the communities and in this crucial juncture and all this dude large extent has been made possible because of a large-scale deployment of cloud technologies that we have done over the last 18 months which has really helped us scale up a large lot of our capabilities in the back yeah I'd love if you could explain a little bit more on that it you know challenging times you know I'm curious the amount of people that are using your services probably haven't changed but the demand and how much they're using it as change a lot so cloud obviously gives you scalability but you know are there concerns about what this does the profitability how you maintain things how much of this is a temporary change and how much will this be you know I know in the United States there's a lot of talk about how much work from home will become more of a standard than it had been before this pandemic so you know short term what's the impact on your business and what are you and other telecommunication companies thinking about what long-term impact this will have >> I think that's a very very interesting question I think even for me and my organization what we have been able to do working from home is amazing I never would have thought that it was possible to do as much as we've been able to do just staying young with most of the work for staying at home and that has really I think happened across industries across the entire country I think many organizations have now realized that work from home or work from anywhere which is the other term he's gonna become quite possible and prevalent going forward because people have realized that you can just get you can get just as much productivity out you can get so many things done working from home and it gives so much more personal flexibility to the individuals so I see when I look back at our organizational experience I see our productivity has been actually quite good actually better then haha where probably even in the office days so I think that is definitely one thing that is gonna come out as a global change across all industries I think the second thing that is gonna happen is data analytics I think there is going to be far more analysis of data to understand patterns and understand trends and how to take advantage of that I think of course the immediate application is in the healthcare and the spread of the pandemic but I think this will spur a lot of other analytics I think the third thing is going to do is the adoption of digital as the primary mode digital was already something that most companies are working on as is a top priority but I think going outward is gonna become very evident to people that it is actually essential just talking about my business I can tell you today you know all the stores all the shops every place that we used to check our cell or recharge vouchers are closed so the only place we are able to get any revenue from is our digital channel and on end only place where customers have been able to recharge their prepaid subscriptions etc has all been through digital I think digital we will also become a massive massive requirement so in that context I think telecom will be seen as a critical critical backbone I think to a large extent it has been seen by many in the past is more of an essential commodity but I think many organizations will realise that this is actually a value creator so I think it's a great exciting opportunity for us to take advantage of those new business opportunities that will come and at the same time be a very very important player in the digital economy that every nation around the world is gonna press you know for Sean said it really appreciates some really good commentary there you know we've been talking for years about customers going through their digital transformation it's really about the data and how they leverage that and if you're data-driven then you really have gone through that transformation and you kind of described what we call the new innovation cocktail you're leveraging cloud that there's data you put those all together as to how you drive your company and you can drive innovation oftentimes when we think about what results we're going to get from deploying cloud and using these types of new technologies we think we know what we're gonna get but the reality of how your company is dealing with things today of course you know proves what you were hoping that build for here help us understand you know what we're talking here is part of red hat summit this week you know what's red hats role in this piece and you know how did the reality of rolling this out and then how it has helped you in the current global situation impacted your business sure oh so I would say actually the three words that I used digital cloud and analytics to me they're actually inseparable cuz I do not believe that you can have a digital business that is not based on cloud or that is not good at data analytics I think if you want to really have a successful cloud offering it implies that automatically that you are a digital business and you're gonna do extensive modern data and analytics and build those capabilities I think those are three inseparable terms now speaking specifically about a red head I would say that red head has been a very very critical partner for us right from the beginning 18 months ago when the two companies too came together to create this network we knew that we had to do several things number one was actually to have a completely rationalized structure which was around extracting the synergies from the from the merger but beyond that we needed to build a telco of the future technology company of the future which will let us transform the business and create capabilities that will give us a step ahead a leapfrog ahead of our competition and cloud was a very very essential part of the journey and we knew we needed to build a cloud based on open systems because we did not want to get into a proprietary logins with anybody and we are a very large business we have suffered a sufficiently large scale to really be able to build a very large cloud so we started working with Red Hat about two years ago and it in the last two years we have deployed 80 plus cloud locations distributed cloud locations across the country and these all of these clouds our vision is to orchestrate them as a single cloud our vision is to build a cloud there is a universal cloud actually that is the word there is a word we use when we talk about cloud it's a universal cloud what does that mean that means that cloud will carry not only the traditional telco workloads but it will also carry IT workloads it will also carry lot of the enterprise offerings we have so - for the end-user for our enterprise clients and all of those capabilities out to be accommodated with a platform that is versatile that is scalable and that is gonna give me in enormous amount of flexibility and control as a organization so Red Hat has been a very important part of the journey and on the red head OpenStack cloud today I have a Daffy's working from any major supplier you can think of I have any enemies working from Nokia Ericsson Huawei ziti even some smaller players like Marvin here so we have demonstrated that this is possible we've been able to break the lock in that the traditional naps have had on their cloud offerings which were really more of a virtualized offerings rather than a cloud computer is a truly universal cloud on the back of the technology provided by a red well that's that's fantastic congratulations on that I love the the result of what you're calling Universal Cloud is the promise that we talked about for a number of years you know is that nitty gritty networking piece it was like you know network functions virtualization and if be sitting an open stack and everybody's like well OpenStack am I trying to build a cloud to compete against the public cloud providers it was like no what you said exactly there's services that you want to be able to deliver and it's not just about oh we're getting away from hardware appliances it's you know just like most people today they're used to whatever smart device they're doing I want to be able to turn on channels and access new things that's your now you know reducing that barrier to Vodafone idea to deliver that to your users have I captured that properly that is correct as a matter of fact I'll just give you one proof point my water phone app is the app that we we have for our consumers and that app is currently running on my telco clock what used to be called the telco cloud so on that platform we are running my packet or actually there are about 40 and FB is for virtualized traditional calculations running alongside with an IT application a digital application okay so one of the things I you know I would like to understand there that what you've deployed there over the last couple of years sounds like a significant shift so you know you're talking about apps you're talking more of a developer type of environment bring us inside a little organizationally you know what new skills have new people had to learn has there been new people added to the organization have there been in a restructures what what is this this this whole initiative to get to universal cloud meant for your organization sure so I look after both the network and IT pieces of the part of parts of the company and you know we traditionally were in the past legacy we have had a IT cloud and we have heard indigo cloud what we are now creating is a single universal cloud what either of the two workloads are gonna be facilitated so for that actually the two organization the two parts of the organization need to come together and start to really work as one now it is very important that the telco guys understand the scale and the 99-year the five nines required in a running a network but at the same time IT guys also understand very much what all of the the flexibility that the business requires and the responsiveness required for the for the enterprise so bringing those two talents together I think in infusing that to create a single organization is one of the biggest challenges I think any telco has we also face it that is one aspect of it the second aspect of it is that there just aren't too many cloud experts in the world and we have been struggling with that I think skill shortage is a clear challenge for us now we try to address it using variety of means we of course try to upscale rescale lot of the traditional network core engineers that we have had we also try to use talent available or from consultants and then we also try to use our vendors so one of the concepts we've been working with our vendors is a concept of a resident engineer so we try to actually get them to second some of their engineers to work with us and at the same time we've been now working with both IBM and redhead to create a program to really go out and create a community around us of developers who can really work with this cloud and therefore we will have enough of skills available to leverage all of the potential benefits there are then the platform but can only be unleashed if I have the right skills and right people you touched on a very important issue it is a challenge but we are working our way through it and so far we've been a bit we make good all right well if it's shot I can't let a CTO go without looking a little bit into the future so want to help understand we talked about some of the technologies talked about transformation of what's happening your business what's happening your organization and there's some big waves coming week you know cloud is still in early days 5g of course you know is expected to have massive impact on on everyone's environment for this so what is the winning formula for the the telecoms going forward well I think Phi G is an exciting world we are a 4G network today the Phi G spectrum hasn't been auctioned in India but what we are building today is what I call a 4G plus network which means the lot of the architectural principles of PI G we have already applied in my core networks today and in my transport network in that world I think IOT is gonna play a very very big role and if you want to do things like IOT and if you want to do things like blockchain now I think telco cloud has a huge role to play because we are the telcos are traditionally the only ones in a country anywhere in the world who have experiences experience in operating in very far front powerful places dealing with lot of the infrastructure challenges especially if you're in a developing country you know that you have to work with a poor power availability poor transport etc I do not see any of the big guys the the big cloud players really having those capabilities today I think telcos are gonna play a very big role in enabling that pi g io t work and it is going to be an exciting journey for telcos I think telcos will very soon be called tech companies that is one thing that I strongly believe in I think also many of the things that depend on blockchain will require the kind of cloud that telcos will create because a telco cloud is far more demanding than a traditional IT application in many ways for example latency or for example throughputs now all those things aren't very important in blockchain apple type of applications I think that's another exciting opportunity for telcos really is to get into that and of course there are discussions about smart cities smart government government and because of Kovach kharkova crisis I think many governments are gonna explore new ways of organizing Society's new ways of governing economic activities and the backbone for a lot of those things is gonna be our telecom networks and the cloud distributed clouds to the edge that we create so I think it'll create many many exciting business opportunities as a consequence of some of those technological innovation yeah Shanta I can't remember who said it as they said don't waste a crisis but Vasant Bora CTO of Vodafone idea pleasure talking with you thank you so much for joining us hope you enjoy the Red Hat event as it is distributed this year and definitely look to be able to meet you sometime at a future physical event back when we have those in the future Thank You Stu it's been a pleasure meeting you virtually and look forward to these all right lots more coverage from the cubes Red Hat summit at 20/20 activity I'm Stu minimun and thanks as always for watching [Music]

>> Live, from Washington DC, it's theCube, covering the AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, and its ecosystem partners. (techno music) >> Welcome back everyone it's theCube's exclusive coverage here, day two of the Amazon Web Sources public sector summit. This is the public sector across the globe. This is their reinvent, this is their big event. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, and also David Vellante's been here doing interviews. Our next guest is, we got Doug Van Dyke, he's the director of U.S. Federal Civilian and Non Profit Sectors of the group, welcome to theCube, good to see you. >> John, thank you very much for having me. >> So you've been in the federal, kind of game, and public sector for a while. You've known, worked with Theresa, at Microsoft before she came to Reinvent. >> 15 years now. >> How is she doing? >> She's doing great, we saw her on main stage yesterday. Force of nature, love working with her, love working for her. This is, like you were saying, this is our re-invent here in D.C. and 14,000 plus, 15,000 registrations, she's on the top of her game. >> What I'm really impressed with her and your team as well, is the focus on growth, but innovation, right? it's not just about, knock down the numbers and compete. Certainly you're competing against people who are playing all kinds of tricks. You got Oracle out there, you got IBM, we've beaten at the CIA. It's a street battle out there in this area in D.C. You guys are innovative, in that you're doing stuff with non-profits, you got mission driven, you're doing the educate stuff, so it's not just a one trick pony here. Take us through some of the where you guys heads are at now, because you're successful, everyone's watching you, you're not small anymore. What's the story? >> So, I think the differentiator for us is our focus on the customers. You know, we've got a great innovation story at the Department of Veterans Affairs with vets.gov. So five years ago if a veteran went out to get the services that the government was going to provide them, they've have to pick from 200 websites. It just wasn't to navigate through 200 websites. So, the innovation group at Veteran's Affairs, the digital services team, figured out, let's pull this all together under a single portal with vets.gov. It's running on AWS, and now veterans have a single interface into all the services they want. >> Doug, one of the things I've been impressed, my first year coming to this. I've been to many other AWS shows, but you've got all these kind of overlapping communities. Of course, the federal government, plus state and local, education. You've got this civilian agencies, so give us a little bit of flavor about that experience here at the show. What trends your hearing from those customers. >> So what's great for me is I've been here almost six and a half years, and I've seen the evolution. And you know, there were the early customers who were just the pioneers like Tom Soderstrom, from JPL, who was on main stage. And then we saw the next wave where there were programs that needed a course correction, like Center for Medicare Medicaid with Healthcare.gov. Where Amazon Web Services came in, took over, helped them with the MarketPlace, you know, get that going. And now we're doing some great innovative things at CMS, aggregating data from all 50 states, about 75 terabytes, so they can do research on fraud, waste, and abuse that they couldn't do before. So we're helping our customers innovate on the cloud, and in the cloud, and it's been a great opportunity. >> Oh my God, I had the pleasure of interviewing Tom Soderstrom two years ago. >> Okay. >> Everybody gets real excited when you talk about space. It's easy to talk about innovation there, but you know, talk about innovation throughout the customers, because some people will look at it, and be like, oh come on, government and their bureaucracy, and they're behind. What kind of innovation are you hearing from your customers? >> So there's an exciting with Department of Energy. They, you know there's a limited amount of resources that you have on premise. Well, they're doing research on the large Hadron Collider in Cern, Switzerland. And they needed to double the amount of capacity that they had on premise. So, went to the AWS cloud, fired up 50,000 cores, brought the data down, and they could do research on it. And so, we're making things possible that couldn't be done previously. >> What are some of the examples that government entities and organizations are doing to create innovation in the private sector? Cause the private sector's been the leader to the public sector, and know you're seeing people starting to integrate it. I mean, half the people behind us, that are exhibiting here, are from the commercial side doing business in the public sector. And public sector doing, enabling action in the private sector. Talk about that dynamic, cause it's not just public sector. >> Right. >> Can you just share your? >> These public, private. Great example with NOAA, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. They have a new program called NEXRAD. It's the next generation of doppler radar. They have 160 stations across the world, collecting moisture, air pressure, all of the indicators that help predict the weather. They partner with us at AWS to put this data out, and through our open data program. And then organizations like the Weather Bug can grab that information, government information, and use it to build the application that you have on your I-Phone that predicts the weather. So you know whether to bring an umbrella to work tomorrow. >> So you're enabling the data from, or stuff from the public, for private, entrepreneurial activity? >> Absolutely. >> Talk about the non-profits. What's going on there? Obviously, we heard som stuff on stage with Teresa. The work she's showcasing, a lot of the non-profit. A lot of mission driven entrepreneurships happening. Here in D.C, it's almost a Silicon Valley like dynamic, where stuff that was never funded before is getting funded because they can do Cloud. They can stand it up pretty quickly and get it going. So, you're seeing kind of a resurgence of mission driven entrepreneurships. What is the nonprofit piece of it look now for AWS? How do you talk about that? >> Sure. Well again, one of the areas that I'm really passionate about being here, and being one of the people who helped start our nonprofit vertical inside of AWS, we now have over 12, I'm sorry, 22,000 nonprofits using AWS to keep going. And the mission of our nonprofit vertical is just to make sure that no nonprofit would ever fail for lack of infrastructure. So we partnered with Tech Soup, which is an organization that helps vet and coordinate our Cloud credits. So nonprofits, small nonprofit organizations can go out through Tech Soup, get access to credits, so they don't have to worry about their infrastructure. And you know we.. >> Free credits? >> Those credits, with the Tech Soup membership, they get those, yeah, and using the word credit, it's more like a grant of AWS cloud. >> You guys are enabling almost grants. >> Yes, cloud grants. Not cash grants, but cloud grants. >> Yeah, yeah great. So, how is that converting for you, in your mind? Can you share some examples of some nonprofits that are successful? >> Sure. A great presentation, and I think it was your last interview. A game changer. Where these smaller nonprofits can have a really large impact. And, but then we're also working with some of the larger nonprofits too. The American Heart Association, that built their precision medicine platform to match genotype, phenotype information, so we can further cardiovascular research. They have this great mission statement, they want to reduce cardiovascular disease by 20 percent by 2020. And we're going to help them do that. >> You guys are doing a great job, I got to say. It's been fun to watch, and now, we've been covering you guys for the past two years now, here at the event. A lot more coming on, in D.C. The CIA went in a few years ago. Certainly a shot heard around the cloud. That's been well documented. The Department of Defense looking good off these certain indicators. But, what's going on in the trends in the civilian agencies? Can you take a minute to give an update on that? >> Yeah, so I started earlier saying I've seen the full spectrum. I saw the very beginning, and then I've seen all the way to the end. Where, I think it was three years ago at this event, I talked to Joe Piva, who is the former CIO for the Department of Commerce ITA, the International Trade Association. He had data center contracts coming up for renewal. And he made a really brave decision to cancel those contracts. So he had 18 months to migrate the entire infrastructure for ITA over on to AWS. And you know, there's nothing like an impending date to move. So, we've got agencies that are going all in on AWS, and I think that's just a sign of the times. >> Data centers, I mean anyone who were startup nine years into it, we've never had a data center. I think most startups don't.. >> Born in the cloud. >> Born in the cloud. Thanks so much Dave, for coming on. Appreciate the time. Congratulations on your success. AWS public sector doing great, global public sector. You guys are doing great. Building nations, we had Baharain on as well. Good luck, and the ecosystems looks good. You guys did a good job. So, congratulations. >> John, Stu, thank you very much for having me here today. >> Live coverage here, we are in Washington D.C. For Cube. Coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit. We'll be back with more. Stay with us, we've got some more interviews after this short break. (techno music)

>> Voiceover: Live from San Francisco, it's The Cube. Covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017. Brought to you by Samsung. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. Live here in San Francisco, this is The Cube's exclusive coverage of Samsung Developer Conference, SDC 2017. I'm John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, and co-host of The Cube. My next guest is Dominic Venuto, who is the General Manager of the consumer division of The Weather Channel, and Watson Advertising, which is part of The Weather Company. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you for having me. >> Finally, I got the consumer guy on. I've interviewed The Weather Company folks from the IBM side, two different brands. One's the data, big data science operation going on, the whole Weather Company. But Weather Channel, the consumer stuff, Weather Underground, that's your product. >> Yes, you saved the best for last. We touch the consumer. >> So, weather content is good. So obviously, the hurricanes have been in the news over the years. Out here in California, the fires. People are interested in whether the impact, it used to be a unique thing on cable, go to the Weather Channel, check the forecast, read the paper. Now with online apps, weather is constantly a utility for users. So it's not a long-tail editorial product. It's pretty fundamental. >> Yeah, we want to be where our consumers are. Fundamentally we want to help people make better decisions and propel the world. And since weather touches everything, we need to be where the consumers are. So now, with all the digital touchpoints, whether that's your phone, or its a watch, your television, desktop if you still have one and you're still using it, as some of us do. We want to be there, for that very reason. And in fact, what we're aiming for, is to move from a utility, because if we are going to help people make better decisions, a utility only goes so far, would be a platform to anticipate behavior and drive decisions. >> So tell me about the Weather Underground and the weather.com consumer product. They're all one in the same now? Obviously one was very successful, with user generated content. This is not going away. Explain the product side of The Weather Channel consumer division. >> Yeah, so we have two brands in our portfolio, Weather Underground, which is more of a challenger brand. It's very data rich, and visualizes data in a number of different ways, that a certain user group really loves. So if you're a weather geek, as we call them, an avid aficionado of weather, and you really want to really get in there and understand what's happening, and look at the data, then Weather Underground is a platform. >> So for users to tie into, to put up weather stations, and other things that might be relevant. >> Exactly so, we started out in 2001, originally the first IOT implementation at the consumer level, connected devices. Where you could connect a personal weather station, put one in your back yard, and connect it to our platform, and feed hyper-local data into our network. And then we feed that into our forecast, to improve that, and actually validate whether the forecast is right or not, based on what people have at home. And we've hit a recent milestone. We've got over 250,000 personal weather stations connected to the network, which we are super thrilled about. And now, what we are doing is, we are extending that network to other connected devices, and air quality is a big topic right now, in other parts of the world, especially in Asia, where air quality is not always where it should be, that's a big thing we think we can... >> That's a big innovation opportunity for you, I mean, you point out the underground product was part of maker-culture, people do-it-yourself weather stations, evolve now into really strong products. That same dynamic could be used for air control, not just micro-climates. >> Exactly, yeah. >> In California, we had a problem this week. >> Exactly, California is a good example, really topical, where cities may have had great air quality, and all of the sudden the environment changes, and you want to know, what is it like? What is the breathing quality like outside right now? And you can come to our network and see that. And we're growing the air quality sensors every month, it's only been up a few months right now, so that's expanding quite well. >> So for the folks that don't know, The Weather Channel back end, has a huge data-driven product. I don't want to get into that piece, because we've talked about it. Go to youtube.com/siliconangle, search Weather Company. You'll see all our great videos from the IBM events, that are out, if you want the detail. But I do want to ask you, what's really happening with you guys, there's two things. One is, it's an app and content for devices, like Samsung is using. And two, essentially you're an IOT network. Sensors are sensors, whether they're user-generated, or user-populated, you guys are deploying a serious IOT capability. >> Absolutely, it's one of the reasons that IBM acquired The Weather Company, which houses the brands of Weather Underground and The Weather Channel, is that we have this fantastic infrastructure, this IOT infrastructure, ingesting large amounts of data, processing it, and then serving it back out to consumers at scale globally. >> What are you guys doing there with Samsung? Anything just particular in the IOT side, or? >> We've got a couple of initiatives going on with Samsung, a few I can't mention right now, but stay tuned. Some really cool things in the connect-at-home, that we're excited about, that builds on some of the work... >> Nest competitor? >> Not exactly a Nest competitor. Think more kitchen. >> Kitchen, okay. >> Think more kitchen. >> We had the goods, cooking in the kitchen, from our previous guest. So the question is, IOT personal, I get that. What else is going on with IOT, with you guys, that you can share? Lifestyle, in the home is great, but... >> So again, going back to how do we help people make better decisions, now that we are collecting data from not just personal weather stations, but air quality monitors, we are collecting it from cars, we are collecting it from the cell phone. We are really able to ingest data at scale, and when you're doing that, we've got hundreds of thousands of data sets that we are feeding into our models, when you do that, we've solved the computing challenge, now we are applying machine-learning and artificial intelligence to process this and extract insights. To validate data sets, in our forecast, and then deliver that back to the end user. >> One of the tech geek themes we talk about all of the time is policy-based something. Programming, setting the policy. So, connecting the dots from what you're saying is, I'm driving my car, and I want to know if it's hot, or the road temperature. I might want to know if I'm running too fast, and my sensor device on me wants to impact the weather, for comfortable breathing for me, for instance. The lifestyle impacts, the content of data, is not just watching a video on The Weather Channel. >> No, it's not. >> So this is a new user experience. It's immersive, it's lifestyle-oriented, it's relevant. What are some of the products you're doing with Samsung, that can enable this new user expectation? >> One of the products that we have right now, we we're one of the initial partners for the Made for Samsung program, is, we've got calendar integration in our app. So now we know, if you've got a meeting coming up, and you need to travel to get there, maybe there's a car trip involved, we know, obviously, the forecast. We know what traffic might be, and we can give you heads up, an alert, that says, hey you might want to leave 15 minutes early for that meeting coming up. That's in the Samsung product right now, which is really, again, helping people make better decisions. So we've got a lot of examples like that. But again, the calendar integration in the Made for Samsung app is really exciting. We recently announced, in fact I think it was this morning, we announced integration with Trip Advisor. So similarly, if we see time on your calendar, and the weather is fine for the weekend, we might suggest outdoor activities for you to go and explore, using Trip Advisor's almost one-billion library of events that they have. >> What's the coolest thing you guys are working on right now? >> Oh, that's a very long list. I say that I'm probably the luckiest guy in IBM right now, because I get to work with millions of consumers, we reach 250 million consumers a month, and I'm also bringing Watson to consumers, and artificial intelligence, which is a unique challenge to solve. Introducing consumers to a new paradigm of user interaction and abilities. So, I think the most exciting thing is taking artificial intelligence and machine-learning, and bringing that to consumers at scale, and solving some of the challenges there. >> Well contratulations. I'm a big fan of IBM, what they're doing with weather data, The Weather Company, The Weather Channel. Bringing that data and immersing it into these new networks that are being created, new capabilities, really helps the consumer, so. Hope to see you at the Think conference coming up next year. >> Yes, we are excited about that, and stay tuned, we may have some more exciting stuff to unveil. >> Make sure our writers get ahold of it, break the stories. It's The Cube, bringing you the data. The weather's fine in San Francisco today. I'm John Farrier with The Cube. More live from San Francisco, from the SDC Samsung Developer Conference, after this short break. (electronic music)