(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone and welcome back to The Cube. We are covering VMware Explore live in San Francisco. This is our third day of wall to wall coverage. And John Furrier is here with me, Lisa Martin. We are excited to welcome two guests from Kasten by Veeam, please welcome Tom Laden, VP of marketing and Matt LeBlanc, not Joey from friends, Matt LeBlanc, the systems engineer from North America at Kasten by Veeam. Welcome guys, great to have you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Tom-- >> Great, go ahead. >> Oh, I was going to say, Tom, talk to us about some of the key challenges customers are coming to you with. >> Key challenges that they have at this point is getting up to speed with Kubernetes. So everybody has it on their list. We want to do Kubernetes, but where are they going to start? Back when VMware came on the market, I was switching from Windows to Mac and I needed to run a Windows application on my Mac and someone told me, "Run a VM." Went to the internet, I downloaded it. And in a half hour I was done. That's not how it works with Kubernetes. So that's a bit of a challenge. >> I mean, Kubernetes, Lisa, remember the early days of The Cube Open Stack was kind of transitioning, Cloud was booming and then Kubernetes was the paper that became the thing that pulled everybody together. It's now de facto in my mind. So that's clear, but there's a lot of different versions of it and you hear VMware, they call it the dial tone. Usually, remember, Pat Gelter, it's a dial tone. Turns out that came from Kit Colbert or no, I think AJ kind of coined the term here, but it's since been there, it's been adopted by everyone. There's different versions. It's open source. AWS is involved. How do you guys look at the relationship with Kubernetes here and VMware Explore with Kubernetes and the customers because they have choices. They can go do it on their own. They can add a little bit with Lambda, Serverless. They can do more here. It's not easy. It's not as easy as people think it is. And then this is a skill gaps problem too. We're seeing a lot of these problems out there. What's your take? >> I'll let Matt talk to that. But what I want to say first is this is also the power of the cloud native ecosystem. The days are gone where companies were selecting one enterprise application and they were building their stack with that. Today they're building applications using dozens, if not hundreds of different components from different vendors or open source platforms. And that is really what creates opportunities for those cloud native developers. So maybe you want to... >> Yeah, we're seeing a lot of hybrid solutions out there. So it's not just choosing one vendor, AKS, EKS, or Tanzu. We're seeing all the above. I had a call this morning with a large healthcare provider and they have a hundred clusters and that's spread across AKS, EKS and GKE. So it is covering everything. Plus the need to have a on-prem solution manage it all. >> I got a stat, I got to share that I want to get your reactions and you can laugh or comment, whatever you want to say. Talk to big CSO, CXO, executive, big company, I won't say the name. We got a thousand developers, a hundred of them have heard of Kubernetes, okay. 10 have touched it and used it and one's good at it. And so his point is that there's a lot of Kubernetes need that people are getting aware. So it shows that there's more and more adoption around. You see a lot of managed services out there. So it's clear it's happening and I'm over exaggerating the ratio probably. But the point is the numbers kind of make sense as a thousand developers. You start to see people getting adoption to it. They're aware of the value, but being good at it is what we're hearing is one of those things. Can you guys share your reaction to that? Is that, I mean, it's hyperbole at some level, but it does point to the fact of adoption trends. You got to get good at it, you got to know how to use it. >> It's very accurate, actually. It's what we're seeing in the market. We've been doing some research of our own, and we have some interesting numbers that we're going to be sharing soon. Analysts don't have a whole lot of numbers these days. So where we're trying to run our own surveys to get a grasp of the market. One simple survey or research element that I've done myself is I used Google trends. And in Google trends, if you go back to 2004 and you compare VMware against Kubernetes, you get a very interesting graph. What you're going to see is that VMware, the adoption curve is practically complete and Kubernetes is clearly taking off. And the volume of searches for Kubernetes today is almost as big as VMware. So that's a big sign that this is starting to happen. But in this process, we have to get those companies to have all of their engineers to be up to speed on Kubernetes. And that's one of the community efforts that we're helping with. We built a website called learning.kasten.io We're going to rebrand it soon at CubeCon, so stay tuned, but we're offering hands on labs there for people to actually come learn Kubernetes with us. Because for us, the faster the adoption goes, the better for our business. >> I was just going to ask you about the learning. So there's a big focus here on educating customers to help dial down the complexity and really get them, these numbers up as John was mentioning. >> And we're really breaking it down to the very beginning. So at this point we have almost 10 labs as we call them up and they start really from install a Kubernetes Cluster and people really hands on are going to install a Kubernetes Cluster. They learn to build an application. They learn obviously to back up the application in the safest way. And then there is how to tune storage, how to implement security, and we're really building it up so that people can step by step in a hands on way learn Kubernetes. >> It's interesting, this VMware Explore, their first new name change, but VMWorld prior, big community, a lot of customers, loyal customers, but they're classic and they're foundational in enterprises and let's face it. Some of 'em aren't going to rip out VMware anytime soon because the workloads are running on it. So in Broadcom we'll have some good action to maybe increase prices or whatnot. So we'll see how that goes. But the personas here are definitely going cloud native. They did with Tanzu, was a great thing. Some stuff was coming off, the fruit's coming off the tree now, you're starting to see it. CNCF has been on this for a long, long time, CubeCon's coming up in Detroit. And so that's just always been great, 'cause you had the day zero event and you got all kinds of community activity, tons of developer action. So here they're talking, let's connect to the developer. There the developers are at CubeCon. So the personas are kind of connecting or overlapping. I'd love to get your thoughts, Matt on? >> So from the personnel that we're talking to, there really is a split between the traditional IT ops and a lot of the people that are here today at VMWare Explore, but we're also talking with the SREs and the dev ops folks. What really needs to happen is we need to get a little bit more experience, some more training and we need to get these two groups to really start to coordinate and work together 'cause you're basically moving from that traditional on-prem environment to a lot of these traditional workloads and the only way to get that experience is to get your hands dirty. >> Right. >> So how would you describe the persona specifically here versus say CubeCon? IT ops? >> Very, very different, well-- >> They still go ahead. Explain. >> Well, I mean, from this perspective, this is all about VMware and everything that they have to offer. So we're dealing with a lot of administrators from that regard. On the Kubernetes side, we have site reliability engineers and their goal is exactly as their title describes. They want to architect arch applications that are very resilient and reliable and it is a different way of working. >> I was on a Twitter spaces about SREs and dev ops and there was people saying their title's called dev ops. Like, no, no, you do dev ops, you don't really, you're not the dev ops person-- >> Right, right. >> But they become the dev ops person because you're the developer running operations. So it's been weird how dev ops been co-opted as a position. >> And that is really interesting. One person told me earlier when I started Kasten, we have this new persona. It's the dev ops person. That is the person that we're going after. But then talking to a few other people who were like, "They're not falling from space." It's people who used to do other jobs who now have a more dev ops approach to what they're doing. It's not a new-- >> And then the SRE conversation was in site, reliable engineer comes from Google, from one person managing multiple clusters to how that's evolved into being the dev ops. So it's been interesting and this is really the growth of scale, the 10X developer going to more of the cloud native, which is okay, you got to run ops and make the developer go faster. If you look at the stuff we've been covering on The Cube, the trends have been cloud native developers, which I call dev ops like developers. They want to go faster. They want self-service and they don't want to slow down. They don't want to deal with BS, which is go checking security code, wait for the ops team to do something. So data and security seem to be the new ops. Not so much IT ops 'cause that's now cloud. So how do you guys see that in, because Kubernetes is rationalizing this, certainly on the compute side, not so much on storage yet but it seems to be making things better in that grinding area between dev and these complicated ops areas like security data, where it's constantly changing. What do you think about that? >> Well there are still a lot of specialty folks in that area in regards to security operations. The whole idea is be able to script and automate as much as possible and not have to create a ticket to request a VM to be billed or an operating system or an application deployed. They're really empowered to automatically deploy those applications and keep them up. >> And that was the old dev ops role or person. That was what dev ops was called. So again, that is standard. I think at CubeCon, that is something that's expected. >> Yes. >> You would agree with that. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So now translating VM World, VMware Explore to CubeCon, what do you guys see as happening between now and then? Obviously got re:Invent right at the end in that first week of December coming. So that's going to be two major shows coming in now back to back that're going to be super interesting for this ecosystem. >> Quite frankly, if you compare the persona, maybe you have to step away from comparing the personas, but really compare the conversations that we're having. The conversations that you're having at a CubeCon are really deep dives. We will have people coming into our booth and taking 45 minutes, one hour of the time of the people who are supposed to do 10 minute demos because they're asking more and more questions 'cause they want to know every little detail, how things work. The conversations here are more like, why should I learn Kubernetes? Why should I start using Kubernetes? So it's really early day. Now, I'm not saying that in a bad way. This is really exciting 'cause when you hear CNCF say that 97% of enterprises are using Kubernetes, that's obviously that small part of their world. Those are their members. We now want to see that grow to the entire ecosystem, the larger ecosystem. >> Well, it's actually a great thing, actually. It's not a bad thing, but I will counter that by saying I am hearing the conversation here, you guys'll like this on the Veeam side, the other side of the Veeam, there's deep dives on ransomware and air gap and configuration errors on backup and recovery and it's all about Veeam on the other side. Those are the guys here talking deep dive on, making sure that they don't get screwed up on ransomware, not Kubernete, but they're going to Kub, but they're now leaning into Kubernetes. They're crossing into the new era because that's the apps'll end up writing the code for that. >> So the funny part is all of those concepts, ransomware and recovery, they're all, there are similar concepts in the world of Kubernetes and both on the Veeam side as well as the Kasten side, we are supporting a lot of those air gap solutions and providing a ransomware recovery solution and from a air gap perspective, there are a many use cases where you do need to live. It's not just the government entity, but we have customers that are cruise lines in Europe, for example, and they're disconnected. So they need to live in that disconnected world or military as well. >> Well, let's talk about the adoption of customers. I mean this is the customer side. What's accelerating their, what's the conversation with the customer at base, not just here but in the industry with Kubernetes, how would you guys categorize that? And how does that get accelerated? What's the customer situation? >> A big drive to Kubernetes is really about the automation, self-service and reliability. We're seeing the drive to and reduction of resources, being able to do more with less, right? This is ongoing the way it's always been. But I was talking to a large university in Western Canada and they're a huge Veeam customer worth 7000 VMs and three months ago, they said, "Over the next few years, we plan on moving all those workloads to Kubernetes." And the reason for it is really to reduce their workload, both from administration side, cost perspective as well as on-prem resources as well. So there's a lot of good business reasons to do that in addition to the technical reliability concerns. >> So what is those specific reasons? This is where now you start to see the rubber hit the road on acceleration. >> So I would say scale and flexibility that ecosystem, that opportunity to choose any application from that or any tool from that cloud native ecosystem is a big driver. I wanted to add to the adoption. Another area where I see a lot of interest is everything AI, machine learning. One example is also a customer coming from Veeam. We're seeing a lot of that and that's a great thing. It's an AI company that is doing software for automated driving. They decided that VMs alone were not going to be good enough for all of their workloads. And then for select workloads, the more scalable one where scalability was more of a topic, would move to Kubernetes. I think at this point they have like 20% of their workloads on Kubernetes and they're not planning to do away with VMs. VMs are always going to be there just like mainframes still exist. >> Yeah, oh yeah. They're accelerating actually. >> We're projecting over the next few years that we're going to go to a 50/50 and eventually lean towards more Kubernetes than VMs, but it was going to be a mix. >> Do you have a favorite customer example, Tom, that you think really articulates the value of what Kubernetes can deliver to customers where you guys are really coming in and help to demystify it? >> I would think SuperStereo is a really great example and you know the details about it. >> I love the SuperStereo story. They were a AWS customer and they're running OpenShift version three and they need to move to OpenShift version four. There is no upgrade in place. You have to migrate all your apps. Now SuperStereo is a large French IT firm. They have over 700 developers in their environment and it was by their estimation that this was going to take a few months to get that migration done. We're able to go in there and help them with the automation of that migration and Kasten was able to help them architect that migration and we did it in the course of a weekend with two people. >> A weekend? >> A weekend. >> That's a hackathon. I mean, that's not real come on. >> Compared to thousands of man hours and a few months not to mention since they were able to retire that old OpenShift cluster, the OpenShift three, they were able to stop paying Jeff Bezos for a couple of those months, which is tens of thousands of dollars per month. >> Don't tell anyone, keep that down low. You're going to get shot when you leave this place. No, seriously. This is why I think the multi-cloud hybrid is interesting because these kinds of examples are going to be more than less coming down the road. You're going to see, you're going to hear more of these stories than not hear them because what containerization now Kubernetes doing, what Dockers doing now and the role of containers not being such a land grab is allowing Kubernetes to be more versatile in its approach. So I got to ask you, you can almost apply that concept to agility, to other scenarios like spanning data across clouds. >> Yes, and that is what we're seeing. So the call I had this morning with a large insurance provider, you may have that insurance provider, healthcare provider, they're across three of the major hyperscalers clouds and they do that for reliability. Last year, AWS went down, I think three times in Q4 and to have a plan of being able to recover somewhere else, you can actually plan your, it's DR, it's a planned migration. You can do that in a few hours. >> It's interesting, just the sidebar here for a second. We had a couple chats earlier today. We had the influences on and all the super cloud conversations and trying to get more data to share with the audience across multiple areas. One of them was Amazon and that super, the hyper clouds like Amazon, as your Google and the rest are out there, Oracle, IBM and everyone else. There's almost a consensus that maybe there's time for some peace amongst the cloud vendors. Like, "Hey, you've already won." (Tom laughs) Everyone's won, now let's just like, we know where everyone is. Let's go peace time and everyone, then 'cause the relationship's not going to change between public cloud and the new world. So there's a consensus, like what does peace look like? I mean, first of all, the pie's getting bigger. You're seeing ecosystems forming around all the big new areas and that's good thing. That's the tides rise and the pie's getting bigger, there's bigger market out there now so people can share and share. >> I've never worked for any of these big players. So I would have to agree with you, but peace would not drive innovation. And in my heart is with tech innovation. I love it when vendors come up with new solutions that will make things better for customers and if that means that we're moving from on-prem to cloud and back to on-prem, I'm fine with that. >> What excites me is really having the flexibility of being able to choose any provider you want because you do have open standards, being cloud native in the world of Kubernetes. I've recently discovered that the Canadian federal government had mandated to their financial institutions that, "Yes, you may have started all of your on cloud presence in Azure, you need to have an option to be elsewhere." So it's not like-- >> Well, the sovereign cloud is one of those big initiatives, but also going back to Java, we heard another guest earlier, we were thinking about Java, right once ran anywhere, right? So you can't do that today in a cloud, but now with containers-- >> You can. >> Again, this is, again, this is the point that's happening. Explain. >> So when you have, Kubernetes is a strict standard and all of the applications are written to that. So whether you are deploying MongoDB or Postgres or Cassandra or any of the other cloud native apps, you can deploy them pretty much the same, whether they're in AKS, EKS or on Tanzu and it makes it much easier. The world became just a lot less for proprietary. >> So that's the story that everybody wants to hear. How does that happen in a way that is, doesn't stall the innovation and the developer growth 'cause the developers are driving a lot of change. I mean, for all the talk in the industry, the developers are doing pretty good right now. They've got a lot of open source, plentiful, open source growing like crazy. You got shifting left in the CICD pipeline. You got tools coming out with Kubernetes. Infrastructure has code is almost a 100% reality right now. So there's a lot of good things going on for developers. That's not an issue. The issue is just underneath. >> It's a skillset and that is really one of the biggest challenges I see in our deployments is a lack of experience. And it's not everyone. There are some folks that have been playing around for the last couple of years with it and they do have that experience, but there are many people that are still young at this. >> Okay, let's do, as we wrap up, let's do a lead into CubeCon, it's coming up and obviously re:Invent's right behind it. Lisa, we're going to have a lot of pre CubeCon interviews. We'll interview all the committee chairs, program chairs. We'll get the scoop on that, we do that every year. But while we got you guys here, let's do a little pre-pre-preview of CubeCon. What can we expect? What do you guys think is going to happen this year? What does CubeCon look? You guys our big sponsor of CubeCon. You guys do a great job there. Thanks for doing that. The community really recognizes that. But as Kubernetes comes in now for this year, you're looking at probably the what third year now that I would say Kubernetes has been on the front burner, where do you see it on the hockey stick growth? Have we kicked the curve yet? What's going to be the level of intensity for Kubernetes this year? How's that going to impact CubeCon in a way that people may or may not think it will? >> So I think first of all, CubeCon is going to be back at the level where it was before the pandemic, because the show, as many other shows, has been suffering from, I mean, virtual events are not like the in-person events. CubeCon LA was super exciting for all the vendors last year, but the attendees were not really there yet. Valencia was a huge bump already and I think Detroit, it's a very exciting city I heard. So it's going to be a blast and it's going to be a huge attendance, that's what I'm expecting. Second I can, so this is going to be my third personally, in-person CubeCon, comparing how vendors evolved between the previous two. There's going to be a lot of interesting stories from vendors, a lot of new innovation coming onto the market. And I think the conversations that we're going to be having will yet, again, be much more about live applications and people using Kubernetes in production rather than those at the first in-person CubeCon for me in LA where it was a lot about learning still, we're going to continue to help people learn 'cause it's really important for us but the exciting part about CubeCon is you're talking to people who are using Kubernetes in production and that's really cool. >> And users contributing projects too. >> Also. >> I mean Lyft is a poster child there and you've got a lot more. Of course you got the stealth recruiting going on there, Apple, all the big guys are there. They have a booth and no one's attending you like, "Oh come on." Matt, what's your take on CubeCon? Going in, what do you see? And obviously a lot of dynamic new projects. >> I'm going to see much, much deeper tech conversations. As experience increases, the more you learn, the more you realize you have to learn more. >> And the sharing's going to increase too. >> And the sharing, yeah. So I see a lot of deep conversations. It's no longer the, "Why do I need Kubernetes?" It's more, "How do I architect this for my solution or for my environment?" And yeah, I think there's a lot more depth involved and the size of CubeCon is going to be much larger than we've seen in the past. >> And to finish off what I think from the vendor's point of view, what we're going to see is a lot of applications that will be a lot more enterprise-ready because that is the part that was missing so far. It was a lot about the what's new and enabling Kubernetes. But now that adoption is going up, a lot of features for different components still need to be added to have them enterprise-ready. >> And what can the audience expect from you guys at CubeCon? Any teasers you can give us from a marketing perspective? >> Yes. We have a rebranding sitting ready for learning website. It's going to be bigger and better. So we're not no longer going to call it, learning.kasten.io but I'll be happy to come back with you guys and present a new name at CubeCon. >> All right. >> All right. That sounds like a deal. Guys, thank you so much for joining John and me breaking down all things Kubernetes, talking about customer adoption, the challenges, but also what you're doing to demystify it. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you very much. >> Our pleasure. >> Thanks Matt. >> For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube's live coverage of VMware Explore 2022. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe. (gentle music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the cubes day two coverage of VMware Explorer, 22 from San Francisco. Lisa Martin, back here with you with Dave Nicholson, we have a couple of guests from VMware. Joining us, please. Welcome Jay Workman, senior director, cloud partner, and alliances marketing, and Jeff Thompson, VP cloud provider sales at VMware guys. It's great to have you on the program. >>Ah, good to be here. Thanks for having us on. >>We're gonna be talking about a really interesting topic. Sovereign cloud. What is sovereign cloud? Jeff? Why is it important, but fundamentally, what is >>It? Yeah, well, we were just talking a second ago. Aren't we? And it's not about royalty. So yeah, data sovereignty is really becoming super important. It's about the regulation and control of data. So lots of countries now are being very careful and advising companies around where to place data and the jurisdictional controls mandate that personal data or otherwise has to be secured. We ask, we have to have access controls around it and privacy controls around it. So data sovereign clouds are clouds that have been built by our cloud providers in, in, in VMware that specifically satisfy the requirements of those jurisdictions and regulated industries. So we've built a, a little program around that. We launched it about a year ago and continuing to add cloud providers to that. >>Yeah, and I, I think it's also important just to build on what Jeff said is, is who can access that data is becoming increasingly important data is, is almost in it's. It is becoming a bit of a currency. There's a lot of value in data and securing that data is, is becoming over the years increasingly important. So it's, it's not like we built a problem or we created a solution for problem that didn't exist. It's gotten it's, it's been a problem for a while. It's getting exponentially bigger data is expanding and growing exponentially, and it's becoming increasingly important for organizations and companies to realize where my data sits, who can access it, what types of data needs to go and what type of clouds. And it's very, very aligned with multi-cloud because some data can sit in a, in a public cloud, which is fine, but some data needs to be secure. It needs to be resident within country. And so this is, this is what we're addressing through our partners. >>Yeah, I, yeah, I was just gonna add to that. I think there's a classification there there's data residency, and then there's data sovereignty. So residency is just about where is the data, which country is it in sovereignty is around who can access that data. And that's the critical aspect of, of data sovereignty who's got control and access to that data. And how do we make sure that all the controls are in place to make sure that only the right people can get access to that data? Yeah. >>So let's, let's sort of build from the ground up an example, and let's use Western Europe as an example, just because state to state in the United States, although California is about to adopt European standards for privacy in a, in a unique, in a unique, unique way, pick a country in, in Europe, I'm a service provider. I have an offering and that offering includes a stack of hardware and I'm running what we frequently refer to as the STDC or software defined data center stack. So I've got NEX and I've got vs N and I've got vSphere and I'm running and I have a cloud and you have all of the operational tools around that, and you can spin up VMs and render under applications there. And here we are within the borders of this country, what makes it a sovereign cloud at that? So at that point, is that a sovereign cloud or? >>No, not yet. Not it's close. I mean, you nailed, >>What's >>A secret sauce. You nailed the technology underpinning. So we've got 4,500 plus cloud provider partners around the world. Less than 10% of those partners are running the full STDC stack, which we've branded as VMware cloud verified. So the technology underpinning from our perspective is the starting point. Okay. For sovereignty. So they, they, they need that right. Technology. Okay. >>Verified is required for sovereign. Yes. >>Okay. Cloud verified is the required technology stack for sovereign. So they've got vSphere vs. A NSX in there. Okay. A lot of these partners are also offering a multitenant cloud with VMware cloud director on top of that, which is great. That's the starting point. But then we've, we've set a list of standards above and beyond that, in addition to the technology, they've gotta meet certain jurisdiction requirements, certain local compliance requirements and certifications. They've gotta be able to address the data re data residency requirements of their particular jurisdiction. So it's going above and beyond. But to your point, it does vary by country. >>Okay. So, so in this hypothetical example, this is this country. You a stand, I love it. When people talk about Stan, people talk about EMIA and you know, I, I love AMEA food. Isn't AIAN food. One. There's no such thing as a European until you have an Italian, a Britain, a German yep. In Florida arguing about how our beer and our coffee is terrible. Right. Right. Then they're all European. They go home and they don't like each other. Yeah. So, but let's just pretend that there's a thing called Europe. So this, so there's this, so we've got a border, we know residency, right. Because it physically is here. Yep. But what are the things in terms of sovereignty? So you're talking about a lot of kind of certification and validation, making sure that, that everything maps to those existing rules. So is, this is, this is a lot of this administrative and I mean, administrative in the, in the sort of state administrative terminology, >>I I'm let's build on your example. Yeah. So we were talking about food and obviously we know the best food in the world comes from England. >>Of course it does. Yeah. I, no doubt. I agree. I Don not get that. I do. I do do agree. Yeah. >>So UK cloud, fantastic partner for us. Okay. Whether they're one of our first sovereign cloud providers in the program. So UK cloud, they satisfied the requirements with the local UK government. They built out their cloud verified. They built out a stack specifically that enables them to satisfy the requirements of being a sovereign cloud provider. They have local data centers inside the UK. The data from the local government is placed into those data centers. And it's managed by UK people on UK soil so that they know the privacy, they know the security aspects, the compliance, all of that wrapped up on top of a secure SDDC platform. Okay. Satisfies the requirements of the UK government, that they are managing that data in a sovereign way that, that, that aligns to the jurisdictional control that they expect from a company like UK cloud. Well, >>I think to build on that, a UK cloud is an example of certain employees at UK, UK cloud will have certain levels of clearance from the UK government who can access and work on certain databases that are stored within UK cloud. So they're, they're addressing it from multiple fronts, not just with their hardware, software data center framework, but actually at the individual compliance level and individual security clearance level as to who can go in and work on that data. And it's not just a governmental, it's not a public sector thing. I mean, any highly regulated industry, healthcare, financial services, they're all gonna need this type of data protection and data sovereignty. >>Can this work in a hyperscaler? So you've got you, have, you have VMC AVS, right? GC V C >>O >>CVAs O CVS. Thank you. Can it be, can, can a sovereign cloud be created on top of physical infrastructure that is in one of those hyperscalers, >>From our perspective, it's not truly sovereign. If, if it's a United States based company operating in Germany, operating in the UK and a local customer or organization in Germany, or the UK wants to deploy workloads in that cloud, we wouldn't classify that as totally sovereign. Okay. Because by virtue of the cloud act in the United States, that gives the us government rights to request or potentially view some of that data. Yeah. Because it's, it's coming out of a us based operator data center sitting on foreign soil so that the us government has some overreach into that. And some of that data may actually be stored. Some of the metadata may reside back in the us and the customer may not know. So certain workloads would be ideally suited for that. But for something that needs to be truly sovereign and local data residency, that it wouldn't be a good fit. I think that >>Perspectives key thing, going back to residency versus sovereignty. Yeah. It can be, let's go to our UK example. It can be on a hyperscaler in the UK now it's resident in the UK, but some of the metadata, the profiling information could be accessible by the entity in the United States. For example, there now it's not sovereign anymore. So that's the key difference between a, what we view as a pro you know, a pure sovereign cloud play and then maybe a hyperscaler that's got more residency than sovereignty. >>Yeah. We talk a lot about partnerships. This seems to be a unique opportunity for a certain segment of partners yeah. To give that really is an opportunity for them to have a line of business established. That's unique from some of the hyperscale cloud providers. Yeah. Where, where sort of the, the modesty of your size might be an advantage if you're in a local. Yes. You're in Italy and you are a service provider. There sounds like a great fit, >>That's it? Yeah. You've always had the, the beauty of our program. We have 4,500 cloud providers and obviously not, all of them are able to provide a data, a sovereign cloud. We have 20 in the program today in, in the country. You you'd expect them to be in, you know, the UK, Italy, Italy, France, Germany, over in Asia Pacific. We have in Australia and New Zealand, Japan, and, and we have Canada and Latin America to, to dovetail, you know, the United States. But those are the people that have had these long term relationships with the local governments, with these regulated industries and providing those services for many, many years. It's just that now data sovereignty has become more important. And they're able to go that extra mile and say, Hey, we've been doing this pretty much, you know, for decades, but now we're gonna put a wrap and some branding around it and do these extra checks because we absolutely know that we can provide the sovereignty that's required. >>And that's been one of the beautiful things about the entire initiative is we're actually, we're learning a lot from our partners in these countries to Jeff's point have been doing this. They've been long time, VMware partners they've been doing sovereignty. And so collectively together, we're able to really establish a pretty robust framework from, from our perspective, what does data sovereignty mean? Why does it matter? And then that's gonna help us work with the customers, help them decide which workloads need to go and which type of cloud. And it dovetails very, very nicely into a multi-cloud that's a reality. So some of those workloads can sit in the public sector and the hyperscalers and some of 'em need to be sovereign. Yeah. So it's, it's a great solution for our customers >>When you're in customer conversations, especially as, you know, data sovereign to be is becomes a global problem. Where, who are you talking to? Are you talking to CIOs? Are you talking to chief data officers? I imagine this is a pretty senior level conversation. >>Yeah. I it's, I think it's all of the above. Really. It depends. Who's managing the data. What type of customer is it? What vertical market are they in? What compliance regulations are they are they beholden to as a, as an enterprise, depending on which country they're in and do they have a need for a public cloud, they may already be all localized, you know? So it really depends, but it, it could be any of those. It's generally I think a fair, fairly senior level conversation. And it's, it's, it's, it's consultancy, it's us understanding what their needs are working with our partners and figuring out what's the best solution for them. >>And I think going back to, they've probably having those conversations for a long time already. Yeah. Because they probably have had workloads in there for years, maybe even decades. It's just that now sovereignty has become, you know, a more popular, you know, requirements to satisfy. And so they've gone going back to, they've gone the extra mile with those as the trusted advisor with those people. They've all been working with for many, many years to do that work. >>And what sort of any examples you mentioned some of the highly regulated industries, healthcare, financial services, any customer come to mind that you think really articulates the value of what VMware's delivering through its service through its cloud provider program. That makes the obvious why VMware an obvious answer? >>Wow. I, I, I get there's, there's so many it's, it's actually, it's each of our different cloud providers. They bring their win wise to us. And we just have, we have a great library now of assets that are on our sovereign cloud website of those win wires. So it's many industries, many, many countries. So you can really pick, pick your, your choice. There. That's >>A good problem >>To have, >>To the example of UK cloud they're, they're really focused on the UK government. So some of them aren't gonna be referenced. Well, we may have indication of a major financial services company in Australia has deployed with AU cloud, one of our partners. So we we've also got some semi blind references like that. And, and to some degree, a lot of these are maintained as fairly private wins and whatnot for obvious security reasons, but, and we're building it and building that library up, >>You mentioned the number 4,500, a couple of times, you, you referencing VMware cloud provider partners or correct program partners. So VCP P yes. So 45, 4500 is the, kind of, is the, is the number, you know, >>That's the number >>Globally of our okay. >>Partners that are offering a commercial cloud service based at a minimum with vSphere and they're. And many of 'em have many more of our technologies. And we've got little under 10% of those that have the cloud verified designation that are running that full STDC, stack >>Somebody, somebody Talli up, all of that. And the argument has been made that, that rep that, that would mean that VMware cloud. And although some of it's on IAS from hyperscale cloud providers. Sure. But that, that rep, that means that VMware has the third or fourth largest cloud on the planet already right now. >>Right. Yep. >>Which is kind of interesting because yeah. If you go back to when, what 2016 or so when VMC was at least baned about yeah. Is that right? A lot of people were skeptical. I was skeptical very long history with VMware at the time. And I was skeptical. I I'm thinking, nah, it's not gonna work. Yeah. This is desperation. Sorry, pat. I love you. But it's desperation. Right. AWS, their attitude is in this transaction. Sure. Send us some customers we'll them. Yeah. Right. I very, very cynical about it. Completely proved me wrong. Obviously. Where did it go? Went from AWS to Azure to right. Yeah. To GCP, to Oracle, >>Oracle, Alibaba, >>Alibaba. Yep. Globally. >>We've got IBM. Yep. Right. >>Yeah. So along the way, it would be easy to look at that trajectory and say, okay, wow, hyperscale cloud. Yeah. Everything's consolidating great. There's gonna be five or six or 10 of these players. And that's it. And everybody else is out in the cold. Yeah. But it turns out that long tail, if you look at the chart of who the largest VCP P partners are, that long tail of the smaller ones seem to be carving out specialized yes. Niches where you can imagine now, at some point in the future, you sum up this long tail and it becomes larger than maybe one of the hyperscale cloud providers. Right. I don't think a lot of people predicted that. I think, I think people predicted the demise of VMware and frankly, a lot of people in the VMware ecosystem, just like they predicted the demise of the mainframe. Sure. The storage area network fill in the blank. I >>Mean, Jeff and I we've oh yeah. We've been on the, Jeff's been a little longer than I have, but we've been working together for 10 plus years on this. And we've, we've heard that many times. Yeah. Yeah. Our, our ecosystem has grown over the years. We've seen some consolidation, some M and a activity, but we're, we're not even actively recruiting partners and it's growing, we're focused on helping our partners gain more, share internally, gain, more share at wallet, but we're still getting organic growth in the program. Really. So it, it shows, I think that there is value in what we can offer them as a platform to build a cloud on. >>Yeah. What's been interesting is there's there's growth and there's some transition as well. Right? So there's been traditional cloud providers. Who've built a cloud in their data center, some sovereign, some not. And then there's other partners that are adopting VCP P because of our SA. So we've either converted some technology from product into SA or we've built net new SA or we've acquired companies that have been SA only. And now we have a bigger portfolio that service providers, cloud providers, managed service providers are all interested in. So you get resellers channel partners. Who've historically been doing ELAs and reselling to end customers. They're transitioning their business into doing recurring revenue and the only game in town where you really wanna do recurring revenues, VCP P. So our ecosystem is both growing because our cloud providers with their data center are doing more with our customers. And then we're adding more managed service providers because of our SA portfolio. And that, that, that combo, that one, two punch is creating a much bigger VCP P ecosystem overall. >>Yeah. >>Impressive. >>Do you think we have a better idea of what sovereign cloud means? Yes. I think we do. >>It's not Royal. >>It's all about royalty, >>All royalty. What are some of the things Jeff, as we look on the horizon, obviously seven to 10,000 people here at, at VMwares where people really excited to be back. They want to hear it from VMware. They wanna hear from its partner ecosystem, the community. What are some of the things that you think are on the horizon where sovereign cloud is concerned that are really opportunities yeah. For businesses to get it right. >>Yeah. We're in the early days of this, I think there's still a whole bunch of rules, regulatory laws that have not been defined yet. So I think there's gonna be some more learning. There's gonna be some top down guidance like Gaia X in Europe. That's the way that they're defining who gets access and control over what data and what's in. And what's out of that. So we're gonna get more of these Gaia X type things happening around the world, and they're all gonna be slightly different. Everyone's gonna have to understand what they are, how to interpret and then build something around them. So we need to stay on top of that, myself and Jay, to make sure that we've got the right cloud providers in the right space to capitalize on that, build out the sovereign cloud program over time and make sure that what they're building to support aligns with these different requirements that are out there across different countries. So it's an evolving landscape. That's >>Yeah. And one of the things too, we're also doing from a product perspective to better enable partners to, to address these sovereign cloud workloads is where we have, we have gaps maybe in our portfolio is we're partner partnering with some of our ISVs, like a, Konic like a Forex vem. So we can give our partners object storage or ransomware protection to add on to their sovereign cloud service, all accessible through our cloud director consult. So we're, we're enhancing the program that way. And to Jeff's point earlier, we've got 20 partners today. We're hoping to double that by the end of our fiscal year and, and just take a very methodical approach to growth of the program. >>Sounds great guys, early innings though. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about what software and cloud is describing it to us, and also talking about the difference between that data residency and all the, all of the challenges and the, in the landscape that customers are facing. They can go turn to VMware and its ecosystem for that help. We appreciate your insights and your time. Guys. Thank >>You >>For >>Having us. Our >>Pleasure. Appreciate it >>For our guests and Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the cube. This is the end of day, two coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022. Have a great rest of your day. We'll see you tomorrow.

>>Mhm >>Welcome to the cube where we're celebrating the EC 2/15 birthday anniversary. My name is Dave Volonte and we're joined right now by Sandy carter, Vice President of AWS. Welcome Sandy, it's great to see you again, >>David. So great to see you too. Thanks for having me on the show today. >>Very welcome. We were last physically together. I think it was reinvent 2019. Hopefully I'll see you before 2022. But first happy birthday to EC two. I mean, it's hard to imagine back in 2006, the degree to which EC two would impact our industry. Sandy, >>I totally agree. You know, I joined a W S about 4.5 years ago in EC two and it's, it's even amazing to see what's just happened in the last 4.5 years. So I'm with you. Nobody really expected the momentum, but EC two has really shone brightly in value to our customers. >>You know, we've done the public sector summit, you know, many times. It's a great event. Things are a little different in public sector as you well know. So talk about the public sector momentum with EC two and that journey. What have you seen? >>Yeah, so it's a great question day. So I had to go back in the time vault. You know, public sector was founded in 2010 and we were actually founded by the amazon process writing a paper setting up a two pizza team, which happened to be six people. And that journey really started with a lot of our public sector customers thinking that we don't know about the cloud. So we might want to do a pilot or just look at non mission critical workloads now public sector and I know you know this day but public sector is more than just government, it has education, not for profit healthcare and now space. But everybody at that time was very skeptical. So we had to really work hard to migrate some workloads over. And one of our very first non mission critical workloads was the U. S. Navy. Um and what they did was the Navy Media Services actually moved images over to EC two. Now today that seems like oh that's pretty easy. But back then that was a big monumental reference. Um and we had to spend a lot of time on training and education to win the hearts and souls of our customers. So back then we had half of the floor and Herndon Washington, we just had a few people and that room really became a training room. We trained our reps, we trained our customers um research drive. A lot of our early adopters accounts like Nasa and jpl. And um then when cloud first came out and governments that started with the U. S. A. And we announced Govcloud, you know, things really picked up, we had migration of significant workloads. So if you think back to that S. A. P. And just moving media over um with the Navy, the Navy and S. A. P. Migrated their largest S A P E R P solution to the cloud in that time as well. Um, then we started international. Our journey continued with the UK International was UK and us was us. Then we added a P. J. And latin America and Canada. And then of course the partner team which you know, is very close to my heart. Partners today are about 73% of our overall public sector business. And it started out with some interesting small pro program SVS being very crucial to that, accelerating adoption. And then of course now the journey has continued with Covid. That has really accelerated that movement to the cloud. And we're seeing, you know, use of ec two to really help us drive by the cute power needed for A I N. M. L. And taking all that data in from IOT and computing that data. And are they are. Um, and we're really seeing that journey just continue and we see no end in sight. >>So if we can stay in the infancy and sort of the adolescent years of public sector, I mean, remember, I mean as analysts, we were really excited about, you know, the the the introduction of of of of EC two. But but there was a lot of skepticism in whatever industry, financial services, healthcare concerns about security, I presume it was similar in public sector, but I'm interested in how you you dealt with those challenges, how you you listen to folks, you know, how did you drive that leadership to where it is today? >>Yeah, you're right. The the first questions were what is the cloud? Doesn't amazon sell books? What is this clown thing? Um, what is easy to, what is easy to stand for and then what the heck is an instance? You know, way back when there was one instance, it didn't even have a name. And today of course we have over 400 instant types with different names for each one. Um and the big challenges you asked about challenges, the big challenges that we had to face. Dave were first and foremost, how do we educate? Um we had to educate our employees and then we had to educate our customers. So we created these really innovative hands on training programmes, white boarding um, sessions that we needed. They were wildly popular. So we really have to do that and then also prove security as you know. So you asked how we listen to our customers and of course we followed the amazon way we work backwards from where we were. So at that time, customers needed education. And so we started there um, data was really important. We needed to make customer or data for government more available as well. So for instance, we first started hosting the Census Bureau for instance. Um and that was all on EC two. So we had lots of early adopters and I think the early adopters around EC two really helped us to remember. I said that the UK was our international office for a while. So we had NIH we had a genomes project and the UK Ministry of Justice as well. And we had to prove security out. We had to prove how this drove a structured GovCloud and then we had to also prove it out with our partners with things like helping them get fed ramped or other certifications. I'll for that sort of thing as well. And so we really lead in those early days through that education and training. Um we lead with pilots to show the potential of the possible and we lead with that security setting those security standards and those compliance certifications, always listening to the customer, always listening to the partner, knowing how important the partners we're going to be. So for example, recovery dot gov was the first government wide system that moved to the cloud. Um the recovery transparency board was first overseeing that Recovery act spending, which included stimulus tracking website. I don't know if you remember that, but they hosted the recovery dot gov On amazon.com using EC two. And that site quickly made information available to a million visitors per hour and at that time, that was amazing. And the cost savings were significant. We also launched Govcloud. You'd asked about GovCloud earlier and that federal cloud computing strategy when the U. S. Government came out with cloud first and they had to consider what is really going to compel these federal agencies to consider cloud. They had Public-sector customers had 70 requirements for security and safety of the data that we came out with Govcloud to open up all those great opportunities. And I think Dave we continue to leave because we are customer obsessed uh you know, still supporting more security standards and compliance sort than any other provider. Um You know, now we lead with data not just data for census or images for the US Navy, but we've got now data in space and ground station and data at scale with customers like Finra who's now doing 100 billion financial transactions. Not just that one million from the early days. So it has been a heck of a ride for public sector and I love the way that the public sector team really used and leveraged the leadership principles. Re invent and simplify dive deep. Be obsessed with the customers start where they are. Um and make sure that you're always always always listening to what they need. >>You know, it's interesting just observing public sector. It's not uncommon, especially because of the certifications that some of the services, you know come out after they come out for the commercial sector. And I remember years ago when I was at I. D. C. I was kind of the steward of the public sector business. And that was a time when everybody was trying to focus in public sector on commercial off the shelf software. That was the big thing. And they want to understand, they wanted to look at commercial use cases and how they could apply them to government. And when I dug in a little bit and met with generals and like eight different agencies, I was struck by how many really smart people and the things that they were doing. And I said at the time, you know, a lot of my commercial clients could learn a lot from you. And so the reason I bring that up is because I saw the same thing with Govcloud because there was a lot of skepticism in various industries, particularly regulated industries, financial services, healthcare. And then when Govcloud hit and the CIA deal hit, people said, whoa CIA, they're like the most security conscious industry or organization in the world. And so I feel as though in a way public sector led that that breakthrough. So I'm wondering when you think about EC two today and the momentum that it has in the government, Are there similar things that you see? Where's the momentum today in public sector? >>You are right on target day? I mean that CIA was a monumental moment and that momentum with ever increasing adoption to the cloud has continued in public sector. In fact today, public sector is one of our fastest growing areas. So we've got um, you know, thousands of startups or multiple countries that were helping out today to really ignite that innovation. We have over 4000 government agencies, 9000 education agencies. Um 2000 public sector partners from all over the globe. 24,000 not for profit organizations. And what I see is the way that they're using EC two um is is leading the pack now, especially after Covid, you know, many of these folks accelerated their journey because of Covid. They got to the cloud faster and now they are doing some really things that no one else is doing like sending an outpost postbox into space or leveraging, you know robots and health care for sure. So that momentum continues today and I love that you were the champion of that you know way back when even when you were with I. D. C. >>So I want to ask you, you sort of touched on some interesting use cases, what are some of the more unusual ones and maybe breakthrough use cases that you see? >>Oh so yeah we have a couple. So one is um I mentioned it earlier but there is a robot now that is powered by IOT and EC two and the robot helps to take temperature and and readings for folks that are entering the hospital in latin America really helped during Covid, one of my favorites. It actually blew the socks off of verne or two and you know that's hard to do is a space startup called lunar outpost and they are synthesizing oxygen on mars now that's, that's driven by Ec two. That's crazy. Right? Um, we see state governments like new york, they've got this vision zero traffic and they're leveraging that to prevent accidents all through new york city. I used to live in new york city. So this is really needed. Um, and it continues like with education, we see university of Illinois and Splunk one of our partners, they created a boarding pass for students to get back to school. So I have a daughter in college. Um, and you know, it's really hard for her to prove that she's had the vaccine or that she's tested negative on the covid test. They came out with a past of this little boarding pass, just like you used to get on an airplane to get into different classes and labs and then a couple of my favorites and you guys actually filmed the Cherokee nation. So the Cherokee nation, the chief of the Cherokee nation was on our silicon um show and silicon angles show and the cube featured them And as the chief talked about how he preserves the Cherokee language. And if you remember the Cherokee language has been used to help out the US in many different ways and Presidio. One of our partners helped to create a game, a super cool game that links in with unity To help teach that next generation the language while they're playing a game and then last but not least axle three d out of the UK. Um, they're using easy to, to save lives. They've created a three D imaging process for people getting ready to get kidney transplants and they have just enhanced that taken the time frame down for months. Now today's that they can actually articulate whether the kidney transplant will work. And when I talked to roger their Ceo, they're doing R. O. L return on life's not return on investment. So those are just some of the unusual and breakthrough use cases that we see powered by E. C. To >>Sandy. I'll give you the last word. Your final closing comments. >>Well, my final closing comments are happy birthday to ec two celebrating 15 years. What a game changer and value added. It has been the early days of Ec two. Of course we're about education like what is the cloud? Why is a bookseller doing it. But um, easy to really help to create a new hub of value Now. We've got customers moving so fast with modernization using a I. M and M. L. Containers survivalists. Um, and all of these things are really changing the game and leveling it up as we increased that business connection. So I think the future is really bright. We've only just begun. We've only just begun with EC two and we've only just begun with public sector. You know, our next great moments are still left to come. >>Well, Sandy, thanks so much. Always Great to see you. Really appreciate your time. >>Thank you so much. Dave. I really appreciate it. And happy birthday again to E. C. To keep >>It right there were celebrating Ec 2's 15th birthday right back. >>Mhm.

>>Hello, and welcome to today's event, dealing government emergency responses beyond the pandemic. This is Bob Wooley, senior fellow for the center for digital government and formerly the chief tech clerk for the state of Utah. I'm excited to serve as moderator for today's event. And just want to say, thank you for joining us. I know we're in for an informative session over the next 60 minutes before we begin a couple of brief housekeeping notes or recording of this presentation will be emailed to all registrants within 48 hours. You can use the recording for your reference or feel free to pass it along to colleagues. This webcast is designed to be interactive and you can participate in Q and a with us by asking questions at any time during the presentation, you should see a Q and a box on the bottom left of the presentation panel. >>Please send in your questions as they come out throughout the presentation, our speakers will address as many of these questions as we can during the Q and a portion of the close of our webinar today, if you would like to download the PDF of the slides for this presentation, you can do so by clicking the webinar resources widget at the bottom of the console. Also during today's webinar, you'll be able to connect with your peers by LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Please use the hashtag gov tech live to connect with your peers across the government technology platform, via Twitter. At the close of the webinar, we encourage you to complete a brief survey about the presentation. We would like to hear what you think if you're unable to see with us for the entire webinar, but we're just like to complete the survey. As much as you're able, please click the survey widget at the bottom of the screen to launch the survey. Otherwise it will pop up once the webinar concludes at this time, we recommend that you disable your pop-up blockers, and if you experiencing any media player issues or have any other problems, please visit our webcast help guide by clicking on the help button at the bottom of the console. >>Joining me today to discuss this very timely topic are Karen revolt and Tim Burch, Kim Berge currently serves as the administrator of human services for Clark County Nevada. He's invested over 20 years in improving health and human service systems of care or working in the private public and nonprofit sectors. 18 of those years have been in local government in Clark County, Las Vegas, where you served in a variety of capacities, including executive leadership roles as the director of department of social services, as well as the director for the department of family services. He has also served as CEO for provider of innovative hosted software solutions, as well as chief strategy officer for a boutique public sector consulting firm. Karen real-world is the social program management offering lead for government health and human services with IBM Watson health. Karen focuses delivering exciting new offerings by focusing on market opportunities, determining unmet needs and identifying innovative solutions. >>Much of her career has been in health and human services focused on snap, TANIF, Medicaid, affordable care act, and child welfare prior to joining IBM. Karen was the senior director of product management for a systems integrator. She naturally fell in love with being a project manager. She can take her user requirements and deliver offerings. Professionals would use to make their job easier and more productive. Karen has also found fulfillment in working in health and human services on challenges that could possibly impact the outcome of people's lives. Now, before we begin our discussion of the presentation, I want to one, we'd like to learn a little more about you as an audience. So I'm going to ask you a polling question. Please take a look at this. Give us an idea of what is your organization size. I won't bother to read all these to you, but there are other a range of sizes zero to 250 up to 50,000. Please select the one that is most appropriate and then submit. >>It looks like the vast majority are zero to two 50. Don't have too many over 250,000. So this is a very, very interesting piece of information. Now, just to set up our discussion today, what I want to do is just spend just a moment and talk about the issue that we're dealing with. So when you look the COVID-19 pandemic, it's put immense pressure on States. I've been a digital state judge and had been judging a lot of the responses from States around the country. It's been very interesting to me because they bifurcate really into two principle kinds of reactions to the stress providing services that COVID environment present. One is we're in a world of hurt. We don't have enough money. I think I'm going to go home and engage as little as I have to. Those are relatively uncommon. Thankfully, most of them have taken the COVID-19 pandemic has immense opportunity for them to really do a lot more with telework, to do more with getting people, employees, and citizens involved with government services. >>And I've done some really, really creative things along the way. I find that to be a really good thing, but in many States systems have been overloaded as individuals and families throughout the country submitted just an unprecedented number of benefit applications for social services. At the same time, government agencies have had to contend with social distance and the need for a wholly different approach to engage with citizens. Um, overall most public agencies, regardless of how well they've done with technology have certainly felt some strain. Now, today we have the opportunity to go into a discussion with our speakers, have some wonderful experience in these areas, and I'm going to be directing questions to them. And again, we encourage you as you hear what they have to say. Be sure and submit questions that we can pick up later at the time. So Tim, let's start with you. Given that Las Vegas is a hub for hospitality. An industry hit severely as a result of this pandemic. How's the County doing right now and how are you prioritizing the growing needs of the County? >>Thanks Bob. Thanks for having me. Let me start off by giving just a little, maybe context for Clark County too, to our audience today. So, uh, Clark County is, you know, 85% of the state of Nevada if we serve not just as a regional County by way of service provision, but also direct municipal services. Well, if, uh, the famous Las Vegas strip is actually in unincorporated Clark County, and if we were incorporated, we would be the largest city in the state. So I say all of that to kind of help folks understand that we provide a mix of services, not just regional services, like health and human services, the direct and, and missable, uh, services as well as we work with our other five jurisdiction partners, uh, throughout the area. Uh, we are very much, um, I think during the last recession we were called the Detroit of the West. >>And, uh, that was because we're very much seen as a one industry town. Uh, so most like when the car plants, the coal plants closed back East and in the communities fuel that very rapidly, the same thing happens to us when tourism, uh, it's cut. Uh, so of course, when we went into complete shutdown and March, uh, we felt it very rapidly, not just on, uh, uh, tax receipts and collectibles, but the way in which we could deliver services. So of course our first priority was to, uh, like I think you mentioned mobilized staff. We, we mobilized hundreds of staff overnight with laptops and phones and cars and the things they needed to do to get mobile and still provide the priority services that we're mandated to provide from a safety standpoint. Um, and then we got busy working for our clients and that's really where our partnership with IBM and Watson, uh, came in and began planning that in July. And we're able to open that portal up in October to, to really speed up the way in which we're giving assistance to, to our residents. Um, re focus has been on making sure that people stay housed. We have, uh, an estimated, uh, 2.5 million residents and over 150,000 of those households are anticipated to be facing eviction, uh, as of January one. So we, we've got a, a big task ahead of us. >>All of this sounds kind of expensive. Uh, one of the common threads as you know, runs throughout government is, ah, I don't really have the money for that. I think I'd be able to afford that a diaper too, as well. So what types of funding has been made available for counties, a result of a pandemic, >>Primarily our funding stream that we're utilizing to get these services out the door has been the federal cares act. Uh, now we had some jurisdictions regionally around us and even locally that prioritize those funds in a different way. Um, our board of County commissioners, uh, took, um, a sum total of about $85 million of our 240 million that said, this will go directly to residents in the form of rental assistance and basic needs support. No one should lose their home or go hungry during this pandemic. Uh, so we've really been again working through our community partners and through our IBM tools to make sure that happens. >>So how does, how does, how does the cares act funding then support Clark County? Cause it seems to me that the needs would be complex, diverse >>Pretty much so. So as you, as folks may know him a call there's several tronches of the cares act, the original cares act funding that has come down to us again, our board, uh, identified basic needs or rental assistance and, and gave that the department of social service to go to the tunicate, uh, through the community. We then have the cares act, uh, uh, coronavirus relief funds that have, uh, impacted our CDBG and our emergency solutions grants. We've taken those. And that's what we was going to keep a lot of the programs and services, uh, like our IBM Watson portal open past January one when the cares act dollars expire. Uh, our initial response was a very manual one, uh, because even though we have a great home grown homeless management information system, it does not do financials. Uh, so we had 14 local nonprofits adjudicating, uh, this rental assistance program. >>And so we could get our social service visitor portal up, uh, to allow us to take applications digitally and run that through our program. Uh, and, uh, so those partners were obviously very quickly overwhelmed and were able to stand up our portal, uh, which for the reason we were driving so hard, even from, uh, beginning of the conversations where after going into lockdown into contracting in July and getting the portal open in October, which was an amazing turnaround. Uh, so the kudos that IBM team, uh, for getting us up and out the door so quickly, uh, was a tie in, uh, to our, uh, Curam IBM, uh, case management system that we utilize to adjudicate benefits on daily basis in Clark County for all our local indigent population, uh, and high needs folks. Uh, and then that ties into our SAP IBM platform, which gets the checks out the door. >>So what, what we've been able to do with these dollars is created in Lucian, uh, that has allowed us in the last 60 days to get as much money out the door, as our nonprofits were able go out the door in the first six months pandemic. So it really has helped us. Uh, so I'm really grateful to our board of County commissioners for recognizing the investment in technology to, to not only get our teams mobile, but to create ease of access for our constituents and our local residents to give them the help they need quickly and the way that they need it. >>Just to follow up question to that, Tim, that I'm curious about having done a lot of work like this in government, sometimes getting procurement through in a timely way is a bit challenging. How were you able to work through those issues and getting this up and provision so quickly? >>Uh, yeah, so we, we put together a, what we call a pandemic playbook, which is kind of lessons learned. And what we've seen is the folks who were essential workers in the first 60 days of the, uh, pandemic. We were able to get a lot done quickly because we were taking full advantage of the emergency. Uh, it may sound a little crass to folks not inside the service world, but it was, uh, you know, don't want you to crisis. It was things we've been planning or trying to do for years. We need them yesterday. We should have had them yesterday, but let's get them tomorrow and get it moving very quickly. Uh, this IBM procurement was something we were able to step through very quickly because of our longstanding relationship. Our countywide, uh, system of record for our financials is SAP. Uh, we've worked with Curam, uh, solution, uh, for years. >>So we've got this long standing relationship and trust in the product and the teams, which helped us build the business case of why we did it, no need to go out for competitive procurement that we didn't have time. And we needed something that would integrate very quickly into our existing systems. Uh, so that part was there. Now when the folks who were non essential came back in June and the reopening, it was whiplash, uh, the speed at which we were moving, went back to the pace of normal business, uh, which feels like hitting a wall, doing a hundred miles an hour when you're used to having that, uh, mode of doing business. Uh, so that's certainly been a struggle, uh, for all of those involved, uh, in trying to continue to get things up. Um, but, uh, once again, the teams have been great because we've probably tripled our licensure on this portal since we opened it, uh, because of working with outside vendors, uh, to, uh, literally triple the size of our staff that are processing these applications by bringing on temporary staff, uh, and short-term professionals. Uh, and so we've been able to get those things through, uh, because we'd already built the purchasing vehicle during the early onset of the crisis. >>That's very helpful. Karen, IBM has played a really pivotal role in all of this. Uh, IBM Watson health works with a number of global government agencies, raging from counties like Clark County to federal governments. What are some of the major challenges you've seen with your clients as a result of the pandemic and how is technology supporting them in a time of need and give us some background Watson health too. So we kind of know a little more about it because this is really a fascinating area. >>Yeah. Thank you, Bob. And thanks Tim for the background on Clark County, because I think Clark County is definitely also an example of what federal governments and global governments are doing worldwide today. So, um, Watson health is our division within IBM where we really focus on health and human services. And our goal is to really focus in on, um, the outcomes that we're providing to individuals and families and looking at how we use data and insights to really make that impact and that change. And within that division, we have our government health and human services area, which is the focus of where we are with our clients around social program. But it also allows us to work with, um, different agencies and really look at how we can really move the ball in terms of, um, effecting change and outcomes for, um, really moving the needle of how we can, uh, make an impact on individuals and families. >>So as we look at the globe globally as well, you know, everything that Tim had mentioned about how the pandemic has really changed the way that government agencies operate and how they do services, I think it's amazing that you have that pandemic playbook because a lot of agencies in the same way also had these set of activities that they always wanted to go and take part on, but there was no impetus to really allow for that to happen. And with the pandemic, it allowed that to kind of open and say, okay, we can try this. And unfortunately I'm in a very partial house way to do that. And, um, what Tim has mentioned about the new program that they set up for the housing, some of those programs could take a number of years to really get a program online and get through and allowing, uh, the agencies to be able to do that in a matter of weeks is amazing. >>And I think that's really gonna set a precedent as we go forward and how you can bring on programs such as the housing and capability in Canada with the economic, uh, social, um, uh, development and, and Canada need that the same thing. They actually had a multi benefit delivery system that was designed to deliver benefits for three programs. And as part of the department of fisheries and oceans Canada, the, um, the state had an emergency and they really need to set up on how they could provide benefits to the fishermen who had been at that impacted, um, from that. And they also did set up a digital front-end using IBM citizen engagement to start to allow the applications that benefits, um, and they set it up in a matter of weeks. And as I mentioned, we, uh, Clark County had a backend legacy system where they could connect to and process those applications. And this case, this is a brand new program and the case management system that they brought up was on cloud. And they had to set up a new one, but allow them to set up a, what we used to call straight through processing, I think has been now turned, turned or coined contact less, uh, processing and allowing us to really start to move those benefits and get those capabilities out to the citizens in even a faster way than has been imagined. Uh, pre pandemic. >>Karen, I have one follow-up question. I want to ask you, having had a lot of experience with large projects in government. Sometimes there's a real gap between getting to identified real requirements and then actions. How do you, how do you work with clients to make sure that process time to benefit is shortened? >>So we really focus on the user themselves and we take a human centered design focus and really prioritizing what those needs are. Um, so working with the clients, uh, effectively, and then going through agile iterations of brain, that capability out as, um, in, in a phased approach to, so the idea of getting what we can bring out that provides quality and capability to the users, and then over time starting to really roll out additional functions and, um, other, uh, things that citizens or individuals and families would need >>Very helpful. Tim, this is an interesting partnership. It's always good to see partnerships between private sector and government. Tell us a little bit about how the partnership with IBM Watson health was established and what challenges or they were brought into assist, where they brought into assist with back to requirements. Again, within the requirements definitely shifted on us. You know, we had the con looking at, uh, Watson on our child welfare, uh, side of the house that I'm responsible for and how that we could, uh, increase access to everything from tele-health to, to, uh, foster parent benefit, uh, kinship, placement benefits, all those types of things that, that right now are very manual, uh, on the child welfare side. Uh, and then the pandemic kid. And we very quickly realized that we needed, uh, to stand up a, um, a new program because, uh, a little bit for context, uh, the park County, we don't administer TANIF or Medicaid at the County level. >>It is done at the state level. So we don't have, uh, unemployment systems or Medicaid, 10 of snap benefits systems to be able to augment and enroll out. We provide, uh, the indigent supports the, the homelessness prevention, referee housing continuum of care, long-term care, really deep emergency safety net services for our County, which is a little bit different and how those are done. So that was really our focus, which took a lot of in-person investigation. We're helping people qualify for disability benefits so they can get into permanent supportive housing, uh, things that are very intensive. And yet now we have a pandemic where we need things to happen quickly because the cares act money expires at the end of December. And people were facing eviction and eviction can help spread exposure to, to COVID. Uh, so, uh, be able to get in and very rapidly, think about what is the minimal pelvis to MVP. >>What's the minimum viable product that we can get out the door that will help people, uh, entrance to a system as contactless as possible, which again was a complete one 80 from how we had been doing business. Um, and, uh, so the idea that you could get on and you have this intelligent chat bot that can walk you through questions, help you figure out if you look like you might be eligible, roll you right into an application where you can upload the few documents that we're going to require to help verify your coat would impact and do that from a smartphone and under, you know, 20 minutes. Um, it, it, it is amazing. And the fact that we've stood that up and got it out the door in 90 days, it's just amazing to me, uh, when it shows the, uh, strength of partnership. Um, I think we can, we have some shared language because we had that ongoing partnership, but we were able to actually leverage some system architects that we had that were familiar with our community and our other products. So it really helped expedite, uh, getting this, uh, getting this out to the citizens. >>So, uh, I assume that there are some complexities in doing this. So overall, how has this deployment of citizen engagement with Watson gone and how do you measure success other than you got it out quick? How do you know if it's working? >>Yeah. Right. So it's the adage of, you know, quick, fast and good, right. Um, or fast, good and cheap. So, uh, we measure success in this way. Um, how are we getting access as our number one quality measurement here? So we were able to collect, uh, about 13,000 applications, uh, manual NRC, manually folks had to go onto our website, download a PDF, fill it out, email it, or physically drop it off along with their backup. One of their choice of 14 non-profits in town, whichever is closest to them. Um, and, uh, and then wait for that process. And they were able to get 13,000 of those, uh, process for the last six months. Uh, we have, I think we had about 8,000 applications the first month come into the portal and about an equal amount of folks who could not provide the same documentation that it was needed. >>And self-selected out. If we had not had the, the tool in place, we would have had 16,000 applications, half of which would have been non-eligible would have been jamming up the system, uh, when we don't have the bandwidth to deal to deal with that, we, we need to be able to focus in on, uh, Judy Kenny applications that we believe are like a 95% success rate from the moment our staff gets them, but because we have the complex and he was on already being dependent upon the landlord, having to verify the rent amount and be willing to work with us, um, which is a major hurdle. Um, but, uh, so w we knew we could not do is go, just reinvent the manual process digitally that that would have been an abject failure on our behalf. So, uh, the ideas that, uh, folks had can go on a very, had this very intuitive conversation to the chat bot, answer some questions and find out if they're eligible. >>And then self-select out was critical for us to not only make sure that the citizens got the help they needed, but not so burnt out and overload our workforce, which is already feeling the strain of the COVID pandemic on their own personal lives and in their homes and in the workplace. Um, so that was really critical for us. So it's not just about speed, ease of access was important. Uh, the ability to quickly automate things on the fly, uh, we have since changed, uh, the area median income, a qualifier for the rental assistance, because we were able to reallocate more money, uh, to the program. So we were able to open it up to more people. We were able to make that, uh, change to the system very quickly. Uh, the idea that we can go on the home page and put updates, uh, we recognized that, uh, some of our monolingual Hispanic residents were having difficulty even with some guidance getting through the system. >>So we're able to record a, a Spanish language walkthrough and get done on the home page the next day, right into the fordable, there'll be a fine, so they could literally run the YouTube video while they're walking through their application. Side-by-side so things like that, that those are how we are able to, for us measured success, not just in the raw dollars out the door, not just in the number of applications that have come in, but our ability to be responsive when we hear from our constituents and our elected officials that, Hey, I want, I appreciate the 15,000 applications as you all, a process and record time, I've got three, four, five, six, 10 constituents that having this type of problem and be able to go back and retool our systems to make them more intuitive, to do, be able to keep them responsive for us is definitely a measure of success and all of this, probably more qualitative than here we're looking >>For, but, uh, that's for us, that's important. Actually the qualitative side is what usually gets ignored. Uh, Karen, I've got a question that's a follow up for you on the same topic. How does IBM facilitate reporting within this kind of an environment given the different needs of stakeholders, online managers and citizens? What kinds of things do you, are you able to do >>So with, um, the influx of digitalization? I think it allows us to really take a more data-driven approach to start looking at that. So, as, as Tim was mentioning, you can see where potentially users are spending more time on certain questions, or if they're stuck on a question, you can see where the abandoned rate is. So using a more data-driven approach to go in to identify, you know, how do we actually go and, um, continue to drive that user experience that may not be something that we drive directly from the users. So I would say that analytics is really, uh, I think going to continue to be a driving force as government agencies go forward, because now they are capturing the data. But one thing that they have to be careful of is making sure that the data that they're getting is the right data to give them the information, to make the right next steps and decisions. >>And Tim, you know, use a really good example with, um, the chatbot in terms of, you know, with the influx of everything going on with COVID, the citizens are completely flooded with information and how do they get the right information to actually help them decide, can I apply for this chap program? Or should I, you know, not even try and what Tim mentioned just saved the citizens, you know, the people that may not be eligible a lot of time and going through and applying, and then getting denied by having that upfront, I have questions and I need answers. Um, so again, more data-driven of how do we provide that information? And, you know, we've seen traditionally citizens having to go on multiple website, web pages to get an answer to the question, because they're like, I think I have a question in this area, but I'm not exactly sure. And they, then they're starting to hunt and hunt and hunt and not even potentially get an answer. So the chocolate really like technology-wise helps to drive, you know, more data-driven answers to what, um, whether it's a citizen, whether it's, um, Tim who needs to understand how and where my citizens getting stuck, are they able to complete the application where they are? Can we really get the benefits to, um, this individual family for the housing needs >>Too many comments on the same thing. I know you have to communicate measures of success to County executives and others. How do you do that? I mean, are you, do you have enough information to do it? Yeah, we're able to, we actually have a standup meeting every morning where the first thing I learn is how many new applications came in overnight. How many of those were completed with full documentation? How many will be ported over into our system, assigned the staff to work, where they're waiting >>On landlord verification. So I can see the entire pipeline of applications, which helps us then determine, um, Oh, it's, it's not, you know, maybe urban legend is that folks are having difficulty accessing the system. When I see really the bottleneck there, it got gotten the system fine, the bottlenecks laying with our landlord. So let's do a landlord, a town hall and iterate and reeducate them about what their responsibilities are and how easy it is for them to respond with the form they need to attest to. And so it lets us see in real time where we're having difficulties, uh, because, uh, there's a constant pressure on this system. Not just that, uh, we don't want anyone to lose their home, uh, but these dollars also go away within a December. So we've got this dual pressure of get it right and get it right now. >>Uh, and so th the ability to see these data and these metrics on, on a daily basis is critical for us to, to continue to, uh, ModuLite our response. Um, and, and not just get comfortable are baked into well, that's why we developed the flowchart during requirements, and that's just the way things are gonna stay. Uh, that's not how you respond to a pandemic. Uh, and so having a tool and a partner that helps us, uh, stay flexible, state agile, I guess, to, to, to leverage some terminology, uh, is important. And, and it's, it's paid dividends for our citizens. Karen, again, is another up to the same thing. I'm kind of curious about one of the problems of government from time to time. And Tim, I think attest to this is how do you know when Dunn has been reached? How did you go about defining what done would look like for the initial rollout with this kind of a customer? >>So I think Doug, I guess in this case, um, is, is this, isn't able to get the benefits that they're looking for and how do we, uh, you know, starting from, I think what we were talking about earlier, like in terms of requirements and what is the minimum viable, um, part of that, and then you start to add on the bells and whistles that we're really looking to do. So, um, you know, our team worked with him to really define what are those requirements. I know it's a new program. So some of those policy decisions were still also being worked out as the requirements were being defined as well. So making sure that you are staying on top of, okay, what are the key things and what do we really need to do from a compliance standpoint, from a functionality, and obviously, um, the usability of how, uh, an assistant can come on and apply and, um, have those, uh, requirements, make sure that you can meet that, that version before you start adding on additional scope. >>Very helpful. Jim, what's your comment on this since I know done matters to you? Yeah. And look, I I've lived through a, again, multiple, uh, county-wide it implementations and some department wide initiatives as well. So I think we know that our staff always want more so nothing's ever done, uh, which is a challenge and that's on our side of the customer. Um, but, uh, for this, it really was our, our experience of recognizing the, the time was an essence. We didn't have a chance. We didn't have, uh, the space to get into these endless, uh, conversations, uh, the agile approach, rather than doing the traditional waterfall, where we would have been doing requirements tracking for months before we ever started coding, it was what do we need minimally to get a check in the hands of a landlord on behalf of a client, so they don't get evicted. >>And we kept just re honing on that. That's nice. Let's put that in the parking lot. We'll come back to it because again, we want to leverage this investment long term, uh, because we've got a we, and we've got the emergency solutions and CDBG, and then our, uh, mainstream, uh, services we brought on daily basis, but we will come back to those things speed and time are of the essence. So what do we need, uh, to, to get this? So a chance to really, um, educate our staff about the concepts of agile iteration, um, and say, look, this is not just on the it side. We're gonna roll a policy out today around how you're doing things. And we may figure out through data and metrics that it's not working next week, and we'll have to have that. You want it. And you're going to get the same way. >>You're getting updated guidance from the CDC on what to do and what not to do. Uh, health wise, you're getting the same from us, uh, and really to helping the staff understand that process from the beginning was key. And, uh, so, and, and that's, again, partnering with, with our development team in that way was helpful. Um, because once we gave them that kind of charter as I am project champion, this is what we're saying. They did an equally good job of staying on task and getting to the point of is this necessary or nice. And if it wasn't necessary, we put it in the nice category and we'll come back to it. So I think that's really helpful. My experience having done several hundred sheet applications also suggest the need for MBP matters, future stages really matter and not getting caught. My flying squirrels really matters. So you don't get distracted. So let's move on to, let's do a polling question before we go on to some of our other questions. So for our audience, do you have a digital front ends for your benefit delivery? Yes, no. Or we're planning to a lot of response here yet. There we go. Looks like about half, have one and half note. So that's an interesting question. What's going to one more polling question, learn a little more here. Has COVID-19 >>Accelerated or moved cloud. Yes, no. We already run a majority of applications on cloud. Take a moment and respond if you would, please. So this is interesting. No real acceleration was taken place and in terms of moving to cloud is not what I was expecting, but that's interesting. So let's go onto another question then. And Karen, let me direct this one to you, given that feedback, how do you envision technologies such as citizen engagement and watching the system will be used, respond to emergency situations like the pandemic moving forward? I mean, what should government agencies consider given the challenges? This kind of a pandemic is brought upon government and try to tie this in, if you would, what, what is the role of cloud in all of this for making this happen in a timely way? Karen, take it away. >>Okay. Thanks Bob. So as we started the discussion around the digital expansion, you know, we definitely see additional programs and additional capabilities coming online as we continue on. Um, I think, uh, agencies have really seen a way to connect with their citizens and families and landlords, um, in this case an additional way. And he prepared them like there were, uh, presuppose assumptions that the, um, the citizens or landlords really wanted to interact with agency face-to-face and have that high touch part. And I think, um, through this, the governments have really learned that there is a way to still have an impact on the citizen without having a slow, do a face to face. And so I think that's a big realization for them to now really explore other ways to digitally explain, expand their programs and capabilities. Another area that we touched on was around the AI and chat bot piece. >>So as we start to see capabilities like this, the reason why Clark County was able to bring it up quickly and everything was because it was housed on cloud, we are seeing the push of starting to move some of the workloads. I know from a polling question perspective that it's been, um, lighter in terms of getting, uh, moving to the cloud. But we have seen the surge of really chatbots. I think we've been talking about chatbots for a while now. And, um, agencies hadn't really had the ability to start to implement that and really put it into effect. But with the pandemic, they were able to bring things up and, you know, very short amount of time to solve, um, a big challenge of not having the call center be flooded and have a different way to direct that engagement between the citizen and the government. >>So really building a different type of channel for them to engage rather than having to call or to come into an office, which wasn't really allowed in terms of, um, the pandemic. Um, the other thing I'll touch on is, um, 10 mentioned, you know, the backlog of applications that are coming in and we're starting to see the, um, the increase in automation. How do we automate areas where it's administratively highly burdened, but it's really a way that we can start to automate those processes, to give our workers the ability to focus on more of those complex situations that really need attention. So we're starting to see where the trends of trying to push there of can we automate some of those processes, um, uh, uploading documents and verification documents is another way of like, trying to look at, is there a way that we can make that easier? >>Not only for the applicant that's applying, but also for the caseworker. So there's not having to go through that. Um, does the name match, um, the applicant, uh, information and what we're looking on here, and Bob, you mentioned cloud. So behind the scenes of, you know, why, uh, government agencies are really pushing the cloud is, um, you heard about, I mean, with the pandemic, you see a surge of applicants coming in for those benefits and how do we scale for that kind of demand and how do you do that in an inappropriate way, without the huge pressures that you put on to your data center or your staff who's already trying to help our citizens and applicants, applicants, and families get the benefits they need. And so the cloud, um, you know, proposition of trying, being able to be scalable and elastic is really a key driver that we've seen in terms of, uh, uh, government agencies going to cloud. >>We haven't really seen during a pandemic, the core competencies, some of them moving those to cloud, it's really been around that digital front end, the chat bot area of how do we start to really start with that from a cloud perspective and cloud journey, and then start to work in the other processes and other areas. Um, security is also huge, uh, focus right now with the pandemic and everything going online. And with cloud allows you to be able to make sure that you're secure and be able to apply the right security so that you're always covered in terms of the type of demand and, um, impact, uh, that is coming through >>Very helpful. Tim, I'm going to ask to follow up on this of a practical nature. So you brought this up very quickly. Uh, there's a certain amount of suspicion around state government County government about chatbots. How did you get a chat much and be functional so quickly? And were you able to leverage the cloud in this process? Yeah, so on the trust is important. Uh, and I'll go back to my previous statement about individuals being able to see upfront whether they believe they're eligible or not, because nothing will erode trust more than having someone in hours applying and weeks waiting to find out they were denied because they weren't eligible to begin with, uh, that erodes trust. So being able to let folks know right up front, here's what it looks like to be eligible, actually help us build some of that, uh, cause they don't feel like, uh, someone in the bureaucracy is just putting them through the ringer for no reason. >>Um, now in regard to how do we get the chat bot out? I will say, uh, we have a, uh, dynamic it and leadership, uh, team at the highest level of County government who we have been already having conversations over the last year about what it meant to be smart government, uh, the department of social service and family services that I'm responsible for. We're already, uh, hands up first in line, you know, Guinea pigs volunteering to be on the front end of, uh, certain projects. So w we have primed ourselves for, for some of this readiness in that aspect. Um, but for citizen trust, um, the timeliness of application right now is the biggest element of trust. Uh, so I've applied I've I feel like I put my housing future in your hands. Are you going to deliver and having the ability for us to rapidly scale up? >>Uh, we typically have 120 staff in the department of social service that, that are adjudicating benefits for programs on daily basis. We've doubled that with temporary staff, uh, through some partnerships, uh, we're, we're gonna, as of next week, probably have more temporary per professional staff helping an adjudicator applications. No, do full-time County staff, because again, this rush to get the dollars out, out the door. So having a system where I can easily, uh, ramp on new users and manage them without having to be solely dependent upon an already, uh, overworked it staff who were trying to support 37 other departments in the County, um, around infrastructure needs has been greatly helpful. Sounds to me like a strong outcome focus and one that seems to work. Let's move on now to our audience questions. We're getting close to the end of our time. So let's jump into some questions from the audience. A number of you have been asking about getting copies of today's presentation within the next 48 hours. Government technology will provide all attendees with the link to the recording for your reference, or to share with colleagues. Well, let's go to our first question. So this is an interesting one. And Karen, this is for you did IBM work with other counties and States to provide digital engagement portals. >>We did Bob, uh, we've worked, um, so globally we've provided guidance on this. We work closely with New York city. They've been the integral part of the development also with our citizen engagement offering. Um, we work closely with the States. So we worked with New York city. Um, North Carolina was also another state who, um, improved their, uh, citizen engagement piece, bring up their Medicaid and snap, um, applications along with Medicaid. COVID testing along that. And I mentioned, um, the economic and social development in Canada as well. And we also work with the ministry of social development in Singapore. So a number of our customers had put up, uh, a global, uh, or sorry, a citizen engagement frontend. And during this timeframe, >>Very helpful. I don't know how much did you hear your mom provide you, but how much did it cost for initial deployment and what are the ongoing costs in other words, is this thing going to be sustainable over time? >>Yeah, absolutely. So total, uh, to date, we've spent about a $1.8 million on development implementations and licensure. A big chunk of that again has been the rapid extended of licensure, uh, for this program. Um, I think over a third of that is probably licensing because again, we need to get the dollars out and we need staff to do that and making the short term several hundred thousand dollar investment in a professional support staff and having them be able to work this portal is much cheaper than the long-term investment of bringing on a staff, printing a job, uh, during a financial difficulty that we're facing, uh, the single largest fiscal cliff let's get into that us history. Um, so it's not smart to create jobs that have a 30 year, one way to retirement, uh, inside our in unionized government environment here. So having this, the staff that would come on and do this and get out the door on these federal dollars was critical for us. Um, and there is a $800,000 a year, I believe so ongoing costs associated with licensure and, and the programming support. Uh, but once again, we're going to be moving, um, our traditional services into this digital front end. We'll be continuing this because we're, we're, we're facing, it took us, I think, six and a half, seven years to come back from the previous recession. Undoubtedly, take a little longer to get back >>From this one. Here's another interesting question, I guess really primarily Tim Tim was the solution on primarily on premise or in the cloud. >>So we'll, we've done a mix. Uh, the, and I'm starting a lot of feedbacks. I don't know if you all can hear that or not, but the, uh, I think we went on prem for, uh, some people because of the, uh, bridge into our service case manager system, which is on prem. So we did some management there. I do believe the chat bot piece of it though is in the cloud. So we're bringing it down to, from one system to the other. Uh, and, and part of that was a student negotiations and costs and worrying about what long-term is that we have a very stated goal of moving, uh, our Curam platform, which is on-prem, this is the backend. So how are we? We, we set our IBM Watson, uh, portal up, uh, and moving all of that on cloud, uh, because I mean, we've got, uh, a workforce who, uh, has the ability to retire at a very high rate over the next five years. >>And, uh, having 24 seven support in the cloud is, is as a, someone who would be called to respond to emergency situations like the is, is a much better Cod deal for, for myself and the citizen. So migrating, uh, and, um, our typical on-prem stuff up into the cloud, uh, as we continue on this, uh, evolution of what IBM Watson, uh, and the plug into our Curam, uh, system looks like Karen related question for another user is the portal provided with Clara County and others linked to other third-party backend office apps, or can it be, >>Yeah, the answer is it can be it's interoperable. So through APIs, uh, rest, uh, however, um, assistance that they need to be integrated with can definitely be integrated with, uh, like, uh, Tim mentioned, we, we went to the case management solution, but it can be integrated with other applications as well. >>Tim, did you use some other backend third party apps with yours? Uh, we did not. Uh, again, just for speed of getting, uh, this MVP solution out the door. Uh, now what we do with that on the go forward, it is going to look different and probably will include some, another practical question. Given the cares funding should be expended by December. Can this application even be employed at this late date? And you want to take a cut at that? Yeah, for us, uh, once again, we brought up earlier, um, the emergency solutions grants and the community development block grants, which have a Corona virus, uh, CV traunch, each one of those, and those have two to three year expenditure timeframes on them. Uh, so we were going to leverage those to keep this system and some of these programs going once again, that the housing needs, uh, will outstrip our capacity for years to come. >>I guess probably I should have said upfront Las Vegas has one of the worst affordable housing inventories in the nation. Uh, so we know we're going to be facing a housing issue, um, because of this for, for a long time. So we'll be using those two traunches of dollars, ESE, ESPs, uh, CV CDBG, CB funds, uh, in addition to dollars earmarked through some, uh, recreational marijuana license fees that have been dedicated to our homelessness. And when you consider this housing, uh, stability program was part of that homelessness prevention. That's our funding mix locally. Very helpful. So questions maybe for bolts for you on this one, you can probably also teach respond is the system has been set up helping the small business community. Um, this user's been canvassing and the general feeling is that small businesses have been left behind and they've been unable to access funds. What's your response on that? Karen, do you want to take that first? >>Um, yes. So in terms of, uh, the security and sorry. Um, but, uh, can you repeat the last part of that? I just missed the last part when you >>Behind it, but unable to access funds. >>Uh, yeah, so I think from a funding perspective, there's different types of, I think what Tim mentioned in terms of the cares funding, there was different types of funding that came out from a government perspective. Uh, I think there were also other grants and things that are coming out one, uh, that we're still looking at. And I think as we go into the new year, it'll be interesting to see, you know, what additional funding, um, hopefully is, is provided. Uh, but in terms of creativity, we've seen other creative ways that organizations come together to kind of, uh, help with the different agencies, to provide some, some guidance to the community, um, and helping to, uh, provide efforts and, uh, maybe looking at different ways of, um, providing, uh, some of the capabilities that the, either at the County or at the state level that they're able to leverage. But Tim happy to maybe have you chime in here too. >>Yeah. So I'll first start with my wheelhouse and I'll expand out to, to some of my partners. Uh, so the primary, small business, we knew the idea was a daily basis inside this realm is going to be landlords. Uh, so actually this afternoon, we're doing a town hall with folks to be able to roll out, uh, which they will go to our portal to find a corporate landlord program. Uh, so that I seem a landlord for Camille the application pack and on behalf of a hundred residents, rather than us having to adjudicate a hundred individual applications and melon a hundred checks. Uh, so that is because we were listening to that particular segment of the, uh, the business community. Now I know early on, we were, we were really hoping that the, the paycheck protection program federally would have, uh, been dispersed in a way that helped our local small businesses. >>Uh, more we did a, our economic development team did a round of small business supports through our cares act. Uh, our quarterly unfortunate was not open yet. It was just about 15, 20 days shy. So we use, uh, another traditional grant mechanism that we have in place to dedicate that. Uh, but on a go forward board, willing to Congress passes something over the next 30 days, um, that if there's a round two of cares or some other programs, we absolutely now have a tool that we know we can create a digital opening for individuals to come figure out if they're eligible or not for whatever program it is, the it housing, the it, uh, small business operations supports, uh, and it would apply through that process and in a very lightweight, so we're looking forward to how we can expand our footprint to help all of the needs that are present in our community. This leads to another question which may be our last one, but this is an interesting question. How can agencies use COVID-19 as a proof point providing a low cost configurable solutions that can scale across government. Karen, do you want to respond to that? And then Tim also, >>Thanks, Bob. So I believe like, you know, some of the things that we've said in terms of examples of how we were able to bring up the solution quicker, I definitely see that scaling as you go forward and trying to really, um, focus in on the needs and getting that MVP out the door. Uh, and then Tim alluded to this as well. A lot of the change management processes that went into re-imagining what these processes look like. I definitely see a additional, you know, growth mindset of how do we get better processes in place, or really focusing on the core processes so that we can really move the ball forward and continuing to go that path of delivering on a quicker path, uh, leveraging cloud, as we mentioned of, um, some, some of the capabilities around the chat bot and other things to really start to push, um, uh, the capabilities out to those citizens quicker and really reduce that timeline that we have to take on the backend side, um, that that would be our hope and goal, um, given, you know, sort of what we've been able to accomplish and hoping using that as a proof point of how we can do this for other types of, uh, either programs or other processes. >>Yeah, I think, um, the, you know, the tool has given us capability now there, whether we use local leaders leverage that to the fullest really becomes a coming upon us. So do we take a beat, uh, when we can catch our breath and then, you know, work through our executive leadership to say, look, here's all the ways you can use this tool. You've made an enterprise investment in. Um, and I know for us, uh, at Clark County, we've stood up, uh, enterprise, uh, kind of governance team where we can come and talk through all of our enterprise solutions, uh, encourage our other department head peers, uh, to, to examine how you might be able to use this. Is there a way that, um, you know, parks and rec might use this to better access their scholarship programs to make sure that children get into youth sports leagues and don't get left out, uh, because we know youth suicide on the rise and they need something positive to do when this pandemic is clear, I'm there for them to get out and do those things. >>So the possibilities really are out there. It really becomes, um, how do we mind those internally? And I know that being a part of listservs and, uh, you know, gov tech and all the magazines and things are out there to help us think about how do we better use our solutions, um, as well as our IBM partners who are always eager to say, Hey, have you seen how they're using this? Um, it is important for us to continue to keep our imaginations open, um, so that we continue to iterate through this process. Um, cause I, I would hate to see the culture of, um, iteration go away with this pandemic. >>Okay. We have time for one final question. We've already addressed this in part two, and this one is probably for you and that you've used the cares act to eliminate some of the procurement red tape that's shown up. Well, how do you somehow that's been very positive. How do you see that impacting you going forward? What happens when the red tape all comes back? >>Yeah, so I think I mentioned a little bit, uh, about that when some of the folks who are deemed non essential came back during our reopening phases and they're operating at the speed of prior business and red tape where we had all been on this, these green tape, fast tracks, uh, it, it was a bit of a organizational whiplash. Uh, but it, for us, we've had the conversation with executive management of like, we cannot let this get in the way of what our citizens need. So like keep that pressure on our folks to think differently. Don't and, uh, we've gone so far as to, uh, even, uh, maybe take it a step further and investigate what had been done in, in, in Canada. Some other places around, um, like, like going right from in a 48 hour period, going from a procurement statement through a proof of concept and doing purchasing on the backside, like how can we even get this even more streamlined so that we can get the things we need quickly, uh, because the citizens don't understand, wait, we're doing our best, uh, your number 3000 and queue on the phone line that that's not what they need to hear or want to hear during times of crisis. >>Very helpful. Well, I want to be respectful of our one hour commitment, so we'll have to wrap it up here in closing. I want to thank everyone for joining us for today's event and especially a big, thank you goes to Karen and Tim. You've done a really great job of answering a lot of questions and laying this out for us and a special thanks to our partners at IBM for enabling us to bring this worthwhile discussion to our audience. Thanks once again, and we look forward to seeing you at another government technology event,

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public sector Welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of eight of us Reinvent 2020 Virtual. This is the Cube virtual. I'm your host, John Ferrier. We are the Cube virtual. This year not only were in person but because of the pandemic. We're doing the remote interviews, doing the live coverage over the past couple weeks. We'll be covering it in depth. My next guest is Lynn Martin, vice president of government education. Health care for VM Ware Public Sector Thank you for coming on the Q. As part of the public sector day. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks, John. It's my pleasure to be with you to that >>great to see last time you're on the Cube. We were in person and D. C is part of the Public Sector Summit, which is the reinvent for public sector is what I call it Theresa's big event. Teresa Carlson, who runs a U. S public sector. You guys a friend. You've been working together the partnership between VM where AWS has been so strong going back to 2016. I'll never forget. When I interviewed Pat and Andy, A lot of skeptics were like VM Ware E W s turned out to be great. Move at many levels. You're in the field for VM Ware driving the business. What's up? What's the update? >>So a couple exciting things. The partnership has been going great. Ah, lot of transformation work and co innovation between the two companies from the engineering side. And, as you mentioned, great a t the Pat Andy level on Ben. When you take it down to the field, support our government education, healthcare, customers. Great partnership with Theresa and her team. They've done a fabulous job, really, being at the forefront of the cloud transformation across those markets and our partnership together. No, it's pretty exciting. We have a lot of new product announced. It's coming out around our government. Go to market means jointly. So it's been a busy time with co vid and a lot of opportunity for both companies to really market differentiators for some of the challenges that are unique customers face >>when I want to ask you a little bit more on that piece because I know it's been interesting with the pandemic. You guys have had a nice overlay with 80. Invest with Teresa's organization obviously from it from a customer standpoint, Nice fit. Okay. Also, with the pandemic, we're seeing customers certainly doing more modern development. That's a big theme of reinvent also for VM World a few months ago as well. But the operator side of the I t piece is gonna be completely changed. I've been doing some reporting and stories around how not just the modern app site, but the I T portion operating these environments. It's hard in pant with the pandemic, so you start to see that operator meets software meets Cloud kind of world. Can you give your perspective of how that's impacted with the pandemic? Because it seems to have accelerated both i t operations in public sector and modern development of new APS and new surge. So, uh, interesting thoughts. I'd love to get your perspective. >>Yes. So I would say that when you kind of look back at the beginning of 2020 I don't think any of us envisioned quite what we were gonna be facing and what our customers, particularly in public and health care you know have faced. So we have customers jointly that are on the forefront of either providing civil services, national security, education to the students or commercial health care first responders right on the front line around patient care. And what I would say, the observation we had really early on in March was the acceleration of the digital transformation across all of those sectors. So lots of discussions have been taking place, and there were a lot of projects in place that would take a couple of years to probably implement. And I think what occurred with Covic is you really have to accelerate how you were gonna provide those civil services or patient care or education and parts of that digital transformation. I think we're taking for granted. So if you think of, like virtual desktop technology in the education space or, you know, SD when and network capability be of the cloud force for health care providers and things of that nature. So I think the portion played a bigger part in the country, responded to cove it in ensuring that we could do the things we needed to do virtually and quickly and out enabled, you know, speed to market and then infrastructure from companies like VM Ware teamed with an Amazon. We allow the acceleration for that journey. >>You know, the old expression. Necessity is the mother of all invention. Um, education and healthcare in particular really were impacted. They had a pressure points t do differently, things faster e education. We know what's going on there and health care with the pandemic. How how are you managing through this? Because, you know, you had a lot of business in flight prior before the pandemic. Now during and you've got maybe some visibility toe what growth looks like Post pandemic. You still got demand. So how are you managing it with from your perspective, your team? What's it like? How how are you as a leader dealing with this? But it's not like it's slowing down for you. It's increasing in >>demand. Yes, so are our segment was kind of on the forefront within bm where globally, um, we started working with different state, local governments and the federal government ahead of the close downs. You know, in one of the major large metropolitan cities, there were over a billion students that had to be able to be educated virtually and there were challenges around network capability, device capability, all kinds of things. So we've had a lot, a lot of activity and as a company. But you know, my segment, how to really work with corporate to kind of bend, how we do business business process rules as well, to be able to respond quickly and to be agile for our clients and provide different ways to support the needs of those customers. So then they could provide the kind of civil services that the country, you know, counts on them to dio. So I think from the internal perspective, in customer facing, we were able to flex, flex and move very quickly and then internally, within the organization as well. I would say, You know, February to June was almost a blur, were busy on weekend calls and things like that, dealing with all different kinds of situations and the organization as a whole. We were ableto flex and work remotely very quickly. I mean, we just used our own technology and literally upon the shutdown. The only difference is where you were working from, but all the tools, infrastructure and things we had were already in place. So anything from there and then as a leader, the third element, all out is kind of the human element. I think it's it's all an opportunity to connect our teams a little bit. Mawr. You know, you have to put more effort virtually more, all hands because more one on ones and kind of also adapt toe how they're dealing with the different personal things of educating their own Children and their family or caring with elders different types of situations as well. >>It's not business as usual, certainly, but it's, you know, challenging great leadership insight there. Thank you for sharing that. I wanna get back to the cloud impact I did. An interview is part of Amazon's Public Sector Awards program a few months ago or in late spring. Roughly, Um, there was a use case with the center and the Canada government, and the guy was kind of, uh, didn't wanna take sidewall Amazon. I'm not gonna be a spokesperson for Amazon. He ended up when the pandemic hit. He was so big fan of AWS and Cloud connectors example because he was skeptical, but he saw the benefit to speed can you give some examples of customers that you're working with that were getting immediate benefits from cloud in the pandemic. That literally made a big difference in what they did because you're seeing people highlight on, okay, just transmission. But people want to see examples. Can you share some examples where this is where cloud helped? It made a huge difference. And that's an example of what we're talking about here. >>Yes. So I would say, um, um example would be at M. D. Anderson Cancer Institute. Um, they had a need to really expand the connectivity off the facility to segregate patient care and ensure that patients that already, you know, had health issues were segregated from any other co vid patients. And very quickly we saw them scale and extend their data center in record time. I mean, things that traditionally would have taken years were done in months, you know, major accomplishments. In 30 days, a zai mentioned, you know, one of our large cities in the country had to really struggle with off 1.2 billion students in K through 12, many of which count on the school systems for, you know, their meals and things and how you deliver your virtual desktops in that environment. VMC on AWS for horizon is a great example that we saw across many state and local you know, entities in how they transform their education to those clients. Uh, and then the federal government. There's many examples, uh, you know, across some of the larger agencies as well, with BMC on AWS for both horizon and infrastructure as well. As you know, sometimes it wasn't one solution. They might have went a W s native for part vmc on AWS for part. And the combination of that really allows companies to come together in part to get things done very, very quickly. It's >>a great example of the VM Ware cloud on AWS success story. I think what's interesting and how I see you guys really doing well with Amazon. It will get to the partnership in a second. But I wanna call this out because you mentioned that earlier devices the network these air not usually associate with cloud usually clouds. You burst of the cloud clouds. Awesome. All these utility higher level services, Dev Ops Cloud native All goodness, But when you get down to what's going on the pandemic. It's the devices you're using. The desktops. It's the network working at home. How as much as that affected your team and your customers, Can you unpack that a little bit more? >>Yes. So what I would say on that is really when you look atyou out, you know the VMC on AWS offerings and you take it down to an example like the horizon platform horizon allows you with the V m c A W s power behind it to really present your virtual desktop on any device anywhere. And that allowed the education entities to be able to provide those curriculums to the students very quickly and, you know, not really have a big, disconnected downtime on how that was done. So I think you know, you're kind of taking cloud classic infrastructure that you reference and then layering in those unique use cases with the VMC on AWS offerings that then could be applied or telehealth. So you know, lots of examples across the health care industry with telehealth and deploying actually patient care via the M R solutions on BMC on aws is well, so it z really taking core. I t infrastructure layering on a software platform that then allows you to provide all those use cases, whether it be an NYPD or fire departments across the country or education entities or commercial patient care things of that nature as a second layer on top of that cloud infrastructure that you think of normally. >>Well, then I want to congratulate you and the team at VM. Where you guys doing? A great job. Like Teresa Carlson. You guys have a really good focus. Uh, you have a great understanding of how the public sector and commercial dynamics working with cybersecurity, going on all across there. And I just you guys there in space with them. You're doing stuff on the land and the ground station all across the public sector, and and they need faster solutions in the cloud. So congratulations. So I have to ask you, since we're here at reinvent, how is the relationship going? Um, where do you see it evolving? I'll see. We talked about the pressure of education, health care and other areas. I mean, case is gonna be re hall. That's gonna be a complete reinvention. Um, so a lot going on. What's supposed to give us the update. >>So I think that in general, you know the future off the public sector and healthcare space will never go backwards. And the acceleration that we've seen occur over 2020. You're gonna see that accelerate as we move forward. And I think the co innovation between Amazon and B M, where which are both innovative companies coming together to support those markets, I think we have more opportunity ahead of us then behind us. And I think when you look at just the great job Amazon has done in general, I was super excited to see Theresa pick up the health care sector. So we have a whole new space to work together on this year and really lots of exciting, innovative offerings to support both patient care and pharmaceuticals, life science and our payer community across the health care sector, as well as some of the work we've already been doing in the public sector. But given the dynamics in the future outlook of the industry, there's gonna require lots of innovation and different kinds of things to really partner together technically and, you know, aligning our go to market around primarily the customer needs. So I think what's very unique about our partnership in the public and healthcare space is we focus first on the customer needs and the mission of those customers and what they need to achieve. And both companies come to the table with, you know, incredible innovation around solutions to support that market. >>It's a great, great partnership, I gotta say, from a technology standpoint, after Raghu VM Ware when they did this, he's like It's a much deeper It's a real deal is not just the Barney deal is everyone kind of knows the old school, uh, phrases saying It's not really a deal. You guys have really integrated in the field on the customer activities. Strong final question for you You don't mind, um, here it reinvent. You know, people are remote. There's gonna be three weeks, a lot of live coverage. Cube Game day will be doing a lot of support and coverage. But for the audience watching this, what would you say is the most important story people should think about or, um, look at harder. I'm when it comes to cloud collision of public sector and what's gonna happen post pandemic because there's gonna be a new reality. There's gonna be growth strategies that will be in play. Some projects will be doubled down on some may not continue. What's your What's your advice to folks watching? What should they pay attention to this reinvent. >>So I think the number one thing is to really embrace the change going around you. And, you know, I think Amazon will be on the forefront of leading a lot of great innovation in that area. And it's really trying to be open minded about how you take advantage of the things that are coming out and be able to apply that into your infrastructure. So if you look across our customer base, you know there's lots of changes you mentioned. I don't think we'll ever go backwards. And those that will be able to move forward quicker are going to be the ones that embrace the change and really lead and drive that innovation within their organization in reinventing themselves through the kind of technology that a company like Amazon and beyond, where bring to the table >>great insight. Lynn And also there's a lot of great problems to solve and societal benefits a lot of need and you guys doing great work. Thanks for your leadership. And, uh, great conversation. Thank you. >>Thanks very much. >>Okay. Lynn Martin, head of vice president of Global public Sector Uh, government education Healthcare. Lynn Martin, the leader of VM Ware's public sector here in the Cube. I'm John Ferrier. Thanks for watching.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. Yeah, okay. Welcome back to the cubes. Live coverage here. Reinvent 2020 for a W s amazing content happening here within across the industry on digital transformation and more, more important than ever in the public sector has been mawr impacted by anyone during the cove and pandemic. And we're here remotely with the Cube Virtual because of the pandemic. Got a great guest, Kim, a jurist. She's the leader on the U. S. Education, state and local government for a W s public sector Kim, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Remotely, at least we get to have a remote interview. >>Well, thank you for taking the time. This is This is our world these days, so it's good to be able to connect. >>Well, thanks for coming on. We're doing some specialty programming around public sector, mainly because it's such an important area. Uh, Andy Jassy Esquina, which is for the best conference at large at reinvent talks broadly, but I think it highlights what's going on in your world and that is this facing the truth. Um, this digital transformation has been forced upon us. It's accelerated and it's get busy, busy building or get busy figuring out how it might unwind and mawr education virtual remote if we >>didn't >>have video conference, and this could have been a disaster even further, but certainly has impacted everybody in the government education. How is it impacting share with us? What's going on? >>You know, I think that difficult partisans. When we turned on the news early days there in Cove it it was clear that students weren't learning and citizens couldn't get in contact with their government to ask for support. Um, I would say it was that moment in time where the technical debt that whether your state, local or education, you had to quickly realized that you need to connect with your students and your citizens. But I take a look at how quickly they were able to turn across the US Many of them realized what usually took years, literally turned into innovating overnight to support students as well as those filing for on unemployment claims. And I think that's what we heard a lot of, and those were some of the opportunities that Amazon really took, uh, to our customers said, Hey, we can help you solve these problems with great services such as connect >>you know, Connect came up in the keynote multiple times, and he really spend time on that as a as a disruption slash enabler for value. Can you share how cloud has scaled up some of your customers? I know connects, been pretty prominent in the public sector for Covic support and really has changed in saves lives in many cases. Can you share an example of how it's worked out? >>Absolutely. I mean, Rhode Island is is a great example. They use Amazon connect. They helped the state literally address this massive surgeon of unemployment insurance applications due to Cova 19. But literally the call times and the vines were cut down in What they were able to do is answer the call, not just have it be on a fast busy or a disconnect. Whether it was Department of Labor at Rhode Island, whether it was the state of Kentucky or the state of West Virginia, all those authorities use had to deal with that surge, and they were able to do it successfully and literally, in some cases, overnight to support citizens. That's how quickly they were able to innovate and hit those call centers, Um, effectively. But it's not just about the call center, because keep in mind they would go into those call centers with connect. They were able to actually take those calls from home, and we saw that in education as well. Take a look at L. A unified school district. What they had to do to quickly transition from in person training to supporting these students remotely. They had to do it overnight, and they use connect their asses well, not only to support the students, the teachers or the staff, but they took that opportunity to really continue educating and continue serving. >>You know, one of the things I was talking anti about in my one on one interview before reinvent was necessity is the mother of all invention in these days, and I think that came from a quote from one of your customers, like interviewed when asked, You know how the innovation strategy come about, and that's what they said. They said we needed it really bad, and we had to move quickly and then Andy said in his keynote that everything is on full display right now, meaning that the pandemic is forced one and you can see who's winning and who's not based on where they are in the cloud journey. So have to ask you leaderships a big part of this. What is the trend that you're seeing within your world because, you know, government not known for moving fast. And this is a speed game at this point. Healthcare. A big part of that. You got education. Government. What's >>the >>leadership mindset on innovating right now? And can you share because, yeah, you got some easy, you know, examples. Now the point is, hey, way have connect with people were like productivity opportunity that's now the new normal. So even in life does come back. There's new new things that have been discovered. Is that resonating with your your customers? And can you share the leadership mindset? >>Absolutely. So make no mistake. It was never a question of if it was a question of when the pandemic clearly is accelerating it. But, you know, we've been working with over 6500 government agencies and collaborating with them to really focus on some of their mission critical, um called based services. So and this is the new normal. They recognize it. And it's the foundation that during the pandemic that it's been said to say, Hey, we're going to push and we're gonna push quicker because they were actually able to demonstrate that they could do it. I'll give you an example. It's It's a heartbreaking one from my perspective. Being a mom, um, l. A. County Department of Child and Family Services, They operated their analog child protection hotline. Now the numbers are are unfortunate and staggering. But when you took a look at the peak before the pandemic, the call center received as many as 21,000 reports of child abuse and neglect in a month. During those pick times, up to 100 staff members would log in and literally take 120 back to back calls per hour. Now, when you think about that legacy environment with Amazon connect, they were able to continue the service, continue the support to help these Children and available 24 7, and they were able to do it from their homes. So e mean it gives me chills, just thinking about three unfortunate situations. But they were able to quickly move and and continue to support. Yeah, >>and the thing to I want to just bring up also had a customer I interviewed from Canada. I think they were partner with a censure. They had unemployment checks, they couldn't get out, and entitlement things that were literally checks and connect stood up that in like, record time. He was convinced. He's like he was kind of Amazon fan, but he was kind of still out of Amazon. He was like, I'm convinced we're gonna use Amazon going forward. It was a tipping point for him. There's a lot of these tipping points going on right now. This has been a big theme of this reinvent so far. Yeah, cloud transition, two full cloud value. This is the new normal What? What what what can clients get when they have budget or trying to get budget when they say the benefit? The clouds are what? >>Well, I mean again, use another use case. I'll go back to another example in L. A county. So when you think about l. A county itself, um, I won't give you the exact numbers because I don't know him off the top, but approximately 10 million residents and employs over 100,000 staff again. Look at the cost savings that they saw. So, you know, technical data is a problem. Being able to invest is a challenge because of budgets, but they were able to save 60% in one year from there on prem environment and licensing costs. But the cost is one piece. If you could take 17% fewer calls and you're solving those challenges by using a i N M l. Through the technology of what they were gathering through those calls, it made a huge impact and improved their service to their citizens. So you know it. The cost savings air there. And there are so many examples that states air, recognizing that they need to move quicker because they could take advantage of those costs, especially with some of the budget challenges we're going to see across the U. S. >>And the machine learning examples are off the charts. So, Kim, I gotta ask, you going forward now in reinvent what's the big focus for you and your teams and your customers because you guys are very customer focused. You're working backers from the customers. We hear that on and on what is going on in your customer base? One of the priorities, >>um, priorities for us will always remain on the mission to which our customers are focusing on. If we think about education, the question is, how are they re imagining the the delivery and the success in this new world that we're dealing with? So we'll continue to work and innovate with our partners and with amazing All right, a text that are in our business take a look at blackboard, right? They were able to scale 50 times their normal capacity globally, literally within 24 hours they're looking at How do they continue to innovate to serve? We're gonna work with K through 12 through academic medical centers and research, because when you think about what we need is we need to find that vaccine we need to find the ability to treat and serve. We're focused on those missions with the states, the research and the education teams. >>It's been unusual year learning is changing remote learning, remote work, the workforce, the workplace, the workloads. They're all changing. Onda clouds a big part of it. Um, final question for you. What's the take away for reinvent this year means different. You mentioned some of those highlights. What's the big take away for your audience? >>I think for state local education is it's available. It's now, and they have to serve their students and citizens quit. Um, what they've been able to do in the cloud again? A zay said at the start of the interview. They can now do overnight within minutes and hours and and support their citizens. And they have to do it quickly. So, >>uh, coyote to coyote goodness for the state and local governments to >>absolutely it's going to continue. And I think the important part is focused on the opportunity of innovating and supporting the mission >>Can Great to see you. Thanks for the insight. Thanks for the update. Appreciate it. We'll be following it. A lot of great successes. You guys have been having the Cuban involved in a bunch of them and we'll continue to follow the transformation. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. Enjoy Sena. >>Okay. This is the Cube Virtual. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching more coverage. Walter Wall reinvent 2020 Virtual. Thanks for watching. Yeah,

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody Jeffrey Frick with theCUBE. We are getting through the COVID crisis. It continues and impacting the summer. I can't believe the summer's almost over, but there's a whole lot of things going on in terms of privacy and contact tracing and this kind of this feeling that there's this conflict between kind of personal identification and your personal privacy versus the public good around things like contact tracing. And I was in a session last week with two really fantastic experts. I wanted to bring them on the show and we're really excited to have back for I don't even know how many times Michelle has been on Michelle Dennedy, She is the former chief privacy officer at Cisco and now she's running the CEO of Identity, Michelle great to see you. >> Good to see you always Jeff >> Yeah and for the first time Dr. Ann Cavoukian and she is the executive director Global Privacy & Security By Design Center. Joining us from Toronto, worked with the government and is not short on opinions about privacy. (laughing) Ann good to see you. >> Hi Jeff thank you >> Yes, so let's jump into it cause I think one of the fundamental issues that we keep hearing is this zero-sum game. And I know and it's a big topic for you that there seems to be this trade off this either or and specifically let's just go to contact tracing. Cause that's a hot topic right now with COVID. I hear that it's like you're telling everybody where I'm going and you're sharing that with all these other people. How is this even a conversation and where do I get to choose whether I want to participate or not? >> You can't have people traced and tracked and surveil. You simply can't have it and it can't be an either or win lose model. You have to get rid of that data. Zero-sum game where only one person can win and the other one loses and it sums to a total of zero. Get rid of that, that's so yesterday. You have to have both groups winning positive sum. Meaning yes, you need public health and public safety and you need privacy. It's not one versus the other. We can do both and that's what we insist upon. So the contact term tracing app that was developed in Canada was based on the Apple Google framework, which is actually called exposure notification. It's totally privacy protective individuals choose to voluntarily download this app. And no personal information is collected whatsoever. No names, no geolocation data, nothing. It's simply notifies you. If you've been exposed to someone who is COVID-19 positive, and then you can decide on what action you wish to take. Do you want to go get tested? Do you want to go to your family doctor, whatever the decision lies with you, you have total control and that's what privacy is all about. >> Jeffrey: But what about the person who was sick? Who's feeding the top into that process and is the sick person that you're no notifying they obviously their personal information is part of that transaction. >> what the COVID alerts that we developed based on the Apple Google framework. It builds on manual contact tracing, which also take place the two to compliment each other. So the manual contact tracing is when individuals go get to get tested and they're tested as positive. So healthcare nurses will speak to that individual and say, please tell us who you've been in contact with recently, family, friends, et cetera. So the two work together and by working together, we will combat this in a much more effective manner. >> Jeffrey: So shifting over to you Michelle, you know, there's PIN and a lot of conversations all the time about personal identifiable information but right. But then medical has this whole nother class of kind of privacy restrictions and level of care. And I find it really interesting that on one hand, you know, we were trying to do the contract tracing on another hand if you know, my wife works in a public school. If they find out that one of the kids in this class has been exposed to COVID somehow they can't necessarily tell the teacher because of HIPAA restriction. So I wonder if you could share your thoughts on this kind of crossover between privacy and health information when it gets into this kind of public crisis and this inherent conflict for the public right to know and should the teacher be able to be told and it's not a really clean line with a simple answer, I don't think. >> No and Jeff, and you're also layering, you know, when you're talking about student data, you layering another layer of legal restriction. And I think what you're putting your thumb on is something that's really critical. When you talk about privacy engineering, privacy by design and ethics engineering. You can't simply start with the legal premise. So is it lawful to share HIPAA covered data. A child telling mommy I don't feel well not HIPAA covered. A child seeing a doctor for medical services and finding some sort of infection or illness covered, right? So figuring out the origin of the exact same zero one. Am I ill or not, all depends on context. So you have to first figure out, first of all let's tackle the moral issues. Have we decided that it is a moral imperative to expose certain types of data. And I separate that from ethics intentionally and with apologies to true ethicists. The moral imperative is sort of the things we find are so wrong. We don't want a list of kids who are sick or conversely once the tipping point goes the list of kids who are well. So then they are called out that's the moral choice. The ethical choice is just because you can should you, and that's a much longer conversation. Then you get to the legal imperative. Are you allowed to based on the past mistakes that we made. That's what every piece of litigation or legislation is particularly in a common law construct in the US. It's very important to understand that civil law countries like the European theater. They try to prospectively legislate for things that might go wrong. The construct is thinner in a common law economy where you do, you use test cases in the courts of law. That's why we are such a litigious society has its own baggage. But you have to now look at is that legal structure attempting to cover past harms that are so bad that we've decided as a society to punish them, is this a preventative law? And then you finally get to what I say is stage four for every evaluation is isn't viable, are the protections that you have to put on top of these restrictions. So dire that they either cannot be maintained because of culture process or cash or it just doesn't make sense anymore. So does it, is it better to just feel someone's forehead for illness rather than giving a blood assay, having it sent away for three weeks and then maybe blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. >> Right. >> You have to look at this as a system problem solving issue. >> So I want to look at it in the context of, again kind of this increased level of politicization and or, you know, kind of exposure outside of what's pretty closed. And I want to bring up AIDS and the porn industry very frankly right? Where people behaving in the behavior of the business risk a life threatening disease of which I still don't think it as a virus. So you know why, cause suddenly, you know, we can track for that and that's okay to track for that. And there's a legitimate reason to versus all of the other potential medical conditions that I may or may not have that are not necessarily brought to bear within coming to work. And we might be seeing this very soon. As you said, if people are wanting our temperatures, as we come in the door to check for symptoms. How does that play with privacy and healthcare? It's still fascinates me that certain things is kind of pop out into their own little bucket of regulation. I'm wondering if you could share your thoughts on that Ann. >> You know, whenever you make it privacy versus fill in the blank, especially in the context of healthcare. You end up turning it to a lose lose as opposed to even a win lose. Because you will have fewer people wanting to allow themselves to be tested, to be brought forward for fear of where that information may land. If it lands in the hands of your employer for example or your whoever owns your house if you're in renting, et cetera. It creates enormous problems. So regardless of what you may think of the benefits of that model. History has shown that it doesn't work well that people end up shying away from being tested or seeking treatment or any of those things. Even now with the contact tracing apps that have been developed. If you look globally the contact tracing apps for COVID-19. They have failed the ones that identify individuals in the UK, in Australia, in Western Canada that's how it started out. And they've completely dropped them because they don't work. People shy away from them. They don't use them. So they've gotten rid of that. They've replaced it with the, an app based on the Apple Google framework, which is the one that protects privacy and will encourage people to come forward and seek to be tested. If there's a problem in Germany. Germany is one of the largest privacy data protection countries in the world. Their privacy people are highly trusted in Germany. Germany based their app on the Apple Google framework. About a month ago they released it. And within 24 hours they had 6.5 million people download the app. >> Right. >> Because there is such trust there unlike the rest of the world where there's very little trust and we have to be very careful of the trust deficit. Because we want to encourage people to seek out these apps so they can attempt to be tested if there's a problem, but they're not going to use them. They're just going to shy away from them. If there is such a problem. And in fact I'll never forget. I did an interview about a month ago, three weeks ago in the US on a major major radio station that has like 54 million people followers. And I was telling them about the COVID alert the Canadian contact tracing app, actually it's called exposure notification app, which was built on the Apple Google framework. And people in hoard said they wouldn't trust anyone with it in the US. They just wouldn't trust it. So you see there's such a trust deficit. That's what we have to be careful to avoid. >> So I want to hold on the trust for just a second, but I want to go back to you Michelle and talk about the lessons that we can learn post 9/11. So the other thing right and keep going back to this over and over. It's not a zero-sum game. It's not a zero-sum game and yet that's the way it's often positioned as a way to break down existing barriers. So if you go back to 9/11 probably the highest profile thing being the Patriot Act, you know, where laws are put in place to protect us from terrorism that are going to do things that were not normally allowed to be done. I bet without checking real exhaustively that most of those things are still in place. You know, cause a lot of times laws are written. They don't go away for a long time. What can we learn from what happened after 9/11 and the Patriot Act and what should be really scared of, or careful of or wary of using that as a framework for what's happening now around COVID and privacy. >> It's a perfect, it's not even an analogy because we're feeling the shadows of the Patriot Act. Even now today, we had an agreement from the United States with the European community until recently called the Privacy Shield. And it was basically if companies and organizations that were, that fell under the Federal Trade Commissions jurisdiction, there's a bit of layering legal process here. But if they did and they agreed to supply enough protection to data about people who were present in the European Union to the same or better level than the Europeans would. Then that information could pass through this Privacy Shield unencumbered to and from the United States. That was challenged and taken down. I don't know if it's a month ago or if it's still March it's COVID time, but very recently on basis that the US government can overly and some would say indifferent nations, improperly look at European data based on some of these Patriot Act, FISA courts and other intrusive mechanisms that absolutely do apply if we were under the jurisdiction of the United States. So now companies and private actors are in the position of having to somehow prove that they will mechanize their systems and their processes to be immune from their own government intrusion before they can do digital trade with other parts of the world. We haven't yet seen the commercial disruption that will take place. So the unintended consequence of saying rather than owning the answers or the observations and the intelligence that we got out of the actual 9/11 report, which said we had the information we needed. We did not share enough between the agencies and we didn't have the decision making activity and will to take action in that particular instance. Rather than sticking to that knowledge. Instead we stuck to the Patriot Act, which was all but I believe to Congress people. When I mean, you see the hot mess. That is the US right now. When everyone but two people in the room vote for something on the quick. There's probably some sort of a psychological gun to your head. That's probably well thought out thing. We fight each other. That's part of being an American dammit. So I think having these laws that say, you've got to have this one solution because the boogeyman is coming or COVID is coming or terrorists or child pornographers are coming. There's not one solution. So you really have to break this down into an engineering problem and I don't mean technology when I say engineering. I mean looking at the culture, how much trust do you have? Who is the trusted entity? Do we trust Microsoft more than we trust the US government right now? Maybe that might be your contact. How you're going to build people, process and technology not to avoid a bad thing, but to achieve a positive objective because if you're not achieving that positive objective of understanding that safe to move about without masks on, for example, stop, just stop. >> Right, right. My favorite analogy Jeff, and I think I've said this to you in the past is we don't sit around and debate the merits of viscosity of water to protect concrete holes. We have to make sure that when you lead them to the concrete hole, there's enough water in the hole. No, you're building a swimming pool. What kind of a swimming pool do you want? Is it commercial, Is it toddlers? Is it (indistinct), then you build in correlation, protection and da da da da. But if you start looking at every problem as how to avoid hitting a concrete hole. You're really going to miss the opportunity to build and solve the problem that you want and avoid the risk that you do not want. >> Right right, and I want to go back to you on the trust thing. You got an interesting competent in that other show, talking about working for the government and not working directly for the people are voted in power, but for the kind of the larger bureaucracy and agency. I mean, the Edelman Trust Barometer is really interesting. They come out every year. I think it's their 20th year. And they break down kind of like media, government and business. And who do you trust and who do you not trust? What what's so fascinating about the time we're in today is even within the government, the direction that's coming out is completely diametrically opposed oftentimes between the Fed, the state and the local. So what does kind of this breakdown of trust when you're getting two different opinions from the same basic kind of authority due to people's ability or desire to want to participate and actually share the stuff that maybe or maybe not might get reshared. >> It leaves you with no confidence. Basically, you can't take confidence in any of this. And when I was privacy commissioner. I served for three terms, each term that was a different government, different political power in place. And before they had become the government, they were all for privacy and data protection believed in and all that. And then once they became the government all that changed and all of a sudden they wanted to control everyone's information and they wanted to be in power. No, I don't trust government. You know, people often point to the private sector as being the group you should distrust in terms of privacy. I say no, not at all. To me far worse is actually the government because everyone thinks they're there to do good job and trust them. You can't trust. You have to always look under the hood. I always say trust but verify. So unfortunately we have to be vigilant in terms of the protections we seek for privacy both with private sector and with the government, especially with the government and different levels of government. We need to ensure that people's privacy remains intact. It's preserved now and well into the future. You can't give up on it because there's some emergency a pandemic, a terrorist incident whatever of course we have to address those issues. But you have to insist upon people's privacy being preserved. Privacy forms the foundation of our freedom. You cannot have free and open societies without a solid foundation of privacy. So I'm just encouraging everyone. Don't take anything at face value, just because the government tells you something. It doesn't mean it's so always look under the hood and let us ensure the privacy is strongly protected. See emergencies come and go. The pandemic will end. What cannot end is our privacy and our freedom. >> So this is a little dark in here, but we're going to lighten it up a little bit because there's, as Michelle said, you know, if you think about building a pool versus putting up filling a hole, you know, you can take proactive steps. And there's a lot of conversation about proactive steps and I pulled Ann your thing Privacy by Design, The 7 Foundational Principles. I have the guys pull up a slide. But I think what's really interesting here is, is you're very, very specific prescriptive, proactive, right? Proactive, not reactive. Privacy is the default setting. You know, don't have to read the ULAs and I'm not going to read the, all the words we'll share it. People can find it. But what I wanted to focus on is there is an opportunity to get ahead of the curve, but you just have to be a little bit more thoughtful. >> That's right, and Privacy By Design it's a model of prevention, much like a medical model of prevention where you try to prevent the harms from arising, not just deal with them after the facts through regulatory compliance. Of course we have privacy laws and that's very important, but they usually kick in after there's been a data breach or privacy infraction. So when I was privacy commissioner obviously those laws were intact and we had to follow them, but I wanted something better. I wanted to prevent the privacy harms from arising, just like a medical model of prevention. So that's a Privacy By Design is intended to do is instantiate, embed much needed privacy protective measures into your policies, into your procedures bake it into the code so that it has a constant presence and can prevent the harms from arising. >> Jeffrey: Right right. One of the things I know you love to talk about Michelle is compliance, right? And is compliance enough. I know you like to talk about the law. And I think one of the topics that came up on your guys' prior conversation is, you know, will there be a national law, right? GDPR went through on the European side last year, the California Protection Act. A lot of people think that might become the model for more of a national type of rule. But I tell you, when you watch some of the hearings in DC, you know, I'm sure 90% of these people still print their emails and have their staff hand them to them. I mean, it's really scary that said, you know, regulation always does kind of lag probably when it needs to be put in place because people maybe abuse or go places they shouldn't go. So I wonder if you could share your thoughts on where you think legislation is going to going and how should people kind of see that kind of playing out over the next several years, I guess. >> Yeah, it's such a good question Jeff. And it's like, you know, I think even the guys in Vegas are having trouble with setting the high laws on this. Cameron said in I think it was December of 2019, which was like 15 years ago now that in the first quarter of 2020, we would see a federal law. And I participated in a hearing at the Senate banking committee, again, November, October and in the before times. I'm talking about the same thing and here we are. Will we have a comprehensive, reasonable, privacy law in the United States before the end of this president's term. No, we will not. I can say that with just such faith and fidelity. (laughing) But what does that mean? And I think Katie Porter who I'm starting to just love, she's the Congresswoman who's famous for pulling on her white board and just saying, stop fudging the numbers. Let's talk about the numbers. There's about a, what she calls the 20% legislative flip phone a caucus. So there are 20% or more on both sides of the aisle of people in the US who are in the position of writing our laws. who are still on flip phones and aren't using smart phones and other kinds of technologies. There's a generation gap. And as much as I can kind of chuckle at that a little bit and wink, wink, nudge, nudge, isn't that cute. Because you know, my dad, as you know, is very very technical and he's a senior citizen. This is hard. I hope he doesn't see that but... (laughing) But then it's not old versus young. It's not let's get a whole new group and crop and start over again. What it is instead and this is, you know, as my constant tome sort of anti compliance. I'm not anti compliance. You got to put your underwear on before your pants or it's just really hard. (laughing) And I would love to see anyone who is capable of putting their underwater on afterwards. After you've made the decision of following the process. That is so basic. It comes down to, do you want the data that describes or is donated or observed about human beings. Whether it's performance of your employees. People you would love to entice onto your show to be a guest. People you'd like to listen and consume your content. People you want to meet. People you want to marry. Private data as Ann says, does the form the foundation of our freedom, but it also forms the foundation of our commerce. So that compliance, if you have stacked the deck proactively with an ethics that people can understand and agree with and have a choice about and feel like they have some integrity. Then you will start to see the acceleration factor of privacy being something that belongs on your balance sheet. What kind of data is high quality, high nutrition in the right context. And once you've got that, you're in good shape. >> I'm laughing at privacy on the balance sheet. We just had a big conversation about data on the balance sheets. It's a whole, that's a whole another topic. So we can go for days. I have Pages and pages of notes here. But unfortunately I know we've got some time restrictions. And so, and I want to give you the last word as you look forward. You've been in this for a while. You've been in it from the private side, as well as the government side. And you mentioned lots of other scary things, kind of on the horizon. Like the kick of surveillance creep, which there's all kinds of interesting stuff. You know, what advice do you give to citizens. What advice do you give to leaders in the public sector about framing the privacy conversation >> I always want to start by telling them don't frame privacy as a negative. It's not a negative. It's something that can build so much. If you're a business, you can gain a competitive advantage by strongly protecting your customer's privacy because then it will build such loyalty and you'll gain a competitive advantage. You make it work for you. As a government you want your citizens to have faith in the government. You want to encourage them to understand that as a government you respect their privacy. Privacy is highly contextual. It's only the individual who can make determinations relating to the disclosure of his or her personal information. So make sure you build that trust both as a government and as a business, private sector entity and gain from that. It's not a negative at all, make it work for you, make it work for your citizens, for your customers, make it a plus a win win that will give you the best returns. >> Isn't it nice when doing the right thing actually provides better business outcomes too. It's like diversity of opinion and women on boards. And kind of things- >> I love that. we cover these days. >> Well ladies, thank you very very much for your time. I know you've got a hard stop, so I'm going to cut you loose or else we would go for probably another hour and a half, but thank you so much for your time. Thank you for continuing to beat the drum out there and look forward to our next conversation. Hopefully in the not too distant future. >> My pleasure Jeff. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you too. >> All right She's Michelle. >> She's Ann. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's Coverage of "AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Program". I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California doing the remote interviews, during this pandemic we have our remote crews and getting all the stories and celebrating the award winners and here to feature the most Innovative Connect Deployment. We have Accenture of Canada and the Department of Employment and Social Development of Canada known as ESDC. Guys, congratulations Joel Marchildon, Accenture Canada, managing director and Benoit Long, ESDC of Canada chief transformation officer. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on, and congratulations on the award. >> Thank you. >> Thank you and nice to be here >> So obviously, during this pandemic, a lot of disruption and a lot of business still needs to go on including government services. But the citizens and people need to still do their thing you got a business got to run, and you got to get things going. But the disruptions caused a little bit of how the user experiences are. So this Connect has been interesting. Its been a featured part of what we've been hearing at the Public Sector Summit with Teresa Carlson. You guys, this is a key product. Tell us about the award. What is the solution that is starving and deserving of the award? >> Maybe I'll go first and then pass it over to Benoit. But I think the solution is Amazon Connect based Virtual Contact Center that was stood up fairly quickly, over the course of about four days and really in support of benefit that the Government of Canada was was releasing as part of its economic response to the pandemic. And in the end, its a fully functioning featured contact center solution. Includes an IVR. And, we stood it up for about 1500 to 2000 agents. So that's the the crux of the solution. And maybe Benoit can give a bit of insight as to how it came about so quickly. >> Yeah, we're happy to actually, we were obviously like every other government facing enormous pressures at that time to deliver benefits directly to people who were in true need. The jobs are being lost, our current systems were in trouble because of their age and their archaic nature. And so the challenge was quickly how do we actually support a lot of people really fast. And so it came through immediately that after our initial payments were made under what was called the Canada emergency response benefit that we had to support clients directly and so people turn to the transformation team of all teams. If you wish during a firestorm, to say, well, what could you do? And how could you help. And so we had an established relationship with a number of our system integrators, including Accenture. And we were able to run a competition very rapidly, and Accenture won. And then we deployed in, as Joel said, in a matter of four days, what for us was an exceptional and high quality solution to a significant client problem. And I say that because I think you can imagine how people feel in a pandemic of all things, but with the uncertainty that comes with loss of income, loss of jobs, the question of being able to deal with somebody a real; a human being, as well as to be able to efficiently answer a very simple but straightforward questions rapidly and with high quality, was pretty fundamental for us. So the the people in the groups that we're talking through here we're speaking to millions of people, who were literally being asked to accept the payment rapidly and to be able to connect with us quickly. And without this solution, which was exceptionally well done and of high quality personally as a technology solution, it would not have been possible to even answer any of these queries quickly. >> And well, that's a great point. One of the things that you see with the pandemic, its a disaster in the quote disaster kind of readiness thing. Unforeseen, right. So like other things, you can kind of plan for things, hypothetical, you got scenarios. But this is truly a case where every day counts, every minute counts, because humans are involved. There's no ROI calculation. Its not like, well, what's the payback of our system? The old kind of way to think. This is real results, fast. This is what cloud is all about. This is the promise of cloud, can I stand up something quick, and you did it with a partner, okay. This is like not, like normal. Its like, its like unheard of, right. Four days, with critical infrastructure, critical services that were unforeseen. Take us through what was going on in the war room. As you guys knew this was here. Take us through through what happened. >> So I think I can start. As you can imagine the set of executives that were overseeing the payment process was an exceptional, it was like a bunker, frankly, for about two weeks. We had to suspend the normal operations of the vast majority of our programming. We had to launch brand new payments and benefits systems and programs that nobody has seen before the level of simplicity was maximized in order to deliver the funds quickly. So you can imagine its a Warpath if you wish, because the campaign is really around timing. Timing is fundamental. People are literally losing their jobs, there is no support, there is no funding money for them to be able to buy groceries. So, and the trust that people have in the government is pretty much at risk right there. And there is straightforward but extraordinarily powerful magic moment, if you wish. If you can deliver a solution, then you make a difference for a long time. And so the speed is unheard of on all fronts. When it came to the call center capability and the ability for us to support in a service context, the clients that were desperate to reach us, and we're talking hundreds of thousands of calls a day. We're not talking a few thousand here, ultimately, at some point we were literally getting in overtaken by volumes, call centers, because we had our regular ones still operating. Over a million calls were coming in the day. With the capacity to answer 10s of thousands and so the reality is that the Call Centers that we put up here, very quickly became capable of answering more calls than our regular call centers. And that speaks to the the speed of delivery, the quality of the solution, of course, but the scalability of it. And I have to say maybe unheard of, it may be difficult to replicate the conditions to lead to this are rare. But I have to say that my bosses and most of the government is probably now wondering why we can't do this more often. Why can't we operate with that kind of speed and agility. So I think what you've got is a client in our case, under extreme circumstances, now realizing the new normal will never be the same. That these types of solutions and technology and their scalability, their agility, their speed of deployment, is frankly something we want we want all the time. Now we'd like to be able to do them during normal timeline conditions, but even those will be a fraction of what it used to take. It would have taken us a while I can actually tell you because I was the lead technologist to deploy at scale for the government, Canada, all the call center capabilities under a single software as a service platform. It took us two years to design it two years to procure it, and five years to install it. That's the last experience we have of call center, enterprise scale capabilities. And in this case we went from years, to literally days. >> Well, it takes a crisis sometimes to kind of wire up the simplicity solution that you say, why didn't we do this before? The waterfall meetings getting everyone arguing kind of gets in the way and the old software model, I want to come back to the transformation Benoit a minute, Because I think that's going to be a great success story and some learnings and I want to get your thoughts on that. But I want to go to Joel, because Joel, we've talked to many Accenture executives over the years and most recently, this past 24 months. And the message we've been hearing is, "We're going to be faster. We're not going to be seen as that, a consulting firm, taking our times trying to get a pound of flesh from the client." This is an example of my opinion of a partner working with a problem statement that kind of matches the cloud speed. So you guys have been doing this is not new to Accenture. So take us through how you guys reacted, because one, you got to sync up and get the cadence of what Benoit was trying to do sync up and execute take us through what happened on your side. >> Yeah, I mean, so its an unprecedented way of operating for us as well, frankly. And, we've had to look at, to get this specific solution out the door and respond to an RFP and the commercial requirements that go with that we had to get pretty agile ourselves internally on, how we go through approvals, etc, to make sure that we were there to support Benoit and his team and I think that we saw this as a broader opportunity to really respond to it. To help Canada in a time of need. So I think we had to streamline a lot of our internal processes and make quick decisions that normally even for our organization would have taken, could have taken weeks, right, and we were down to hours and a lot of instances. So it forces us to react and act differently as well. But I mean to Benoit's point I think this is really going to hopefully change the way... It illustrates the art of the possible and hopefully will change how quickly we can look at problems and we reduce deployment timeframes from years to months and months to weeks, etc. For solutions like this. And I think the AWS platform specifically in this case, Benoit touched on a lot of things beat the market scalability, but just as the benefit itself has to be simplified to do this quickly. I think one of the one of the benefits of the solution itself is, its simple to use technologically. I mean, we trained, as I said, I think 1600 agents on how to use the platform over the course of a weekend. And they're not normal agents. These were people who were furloughed from other jobs potentially within the government. So they're not necessarily contact center agents, by training, but they became contact center agents over the course of 48 hours. And I think, from that perspective, that was important as well to have something that people could use to answer those calls that we know that we knew were going to come. >> Benoit this is the transformation dream scenario in the sense of capabilities. I know its under circumstances of the pandemic and you guys did solve a big problem really fast and saved lives and then help people get on with their day. But transformation is about having people closest to the problem, execute. And also the people equation people process technology, as they say, is kind of playing out in real time. This is kind of the playbook. Amazon came in and said, "Hey, you want to stand something up?" You wired it together the solution quickly, you have close to it. Looking back now its almost like, hey, why aren't we doing this before, as you said, and then you had to bring people in, who weren't trained and stood them up and they were delivering the service. This is the playbook to share your thoughts on this because this is what you're you're thinking about all the time, and it actually is playing out in real time. >> Well, I would definitely endorse the idea that its a playbook. Its I would say its an ideal and dream playbook to bid like showing up on a basketball court with all the best players in the entire league playing together magically. It is exactly that. So a lot of things had to happen quickly but also correctly, because you can't pull all these things properly together without that. So I would say the partnership with the private sector here was fundamental. And I have to applaud the work that Accenture did particularly I think, as Canadians we were very proud of the fact that we needed to respond quickly. Everyone was in this our neighbors, we knew people who were without support and Accenture's team, I mean, all the way up and down across the organization was fundamental in and delivering this but also literally putting themselves into these roles and to make sure that we would be able to respond and quickly do so. I think the playbook around the readiness for change, I was shocked into existence. I mean, I won't talk about quantum physics, but clearly some higher level of energy was thrown in quickly, mobilize everybody all at once. Nobody was said he is sitting around saying, I wonder if we have changed management covered off, this was changed readiness at its best. And so I think for me from a learning perspective, apart from just the technology side, which is pretty fundamental, if you don't have ready enough technology to deploy quickly, then the best pay your plans in the world won't work. The reality is that to mobilize an organization going forward into that level of spontaneous driving change, exception, acceptance, and adoption, is really what I would aim for. And so our challenge now will be continuing that kind of progression going forward. And we now found the way and we certainly use the way to work with the private sector in an innovative capacity and innovative ways with brand new solutions that are truly agile and scalable, to be able to pull all of the organization all at once very rapidly and I have to admit that it is going to shift permanently our planning, we had 10 year plans for our big transformations, because some of our programs are the most important in the country in many ways. We support people about 8 million Canadians a month, depending on the benefits payments that we deliver. And they're the most marginal needing and requires our support from seniors, to the unemployed, to job seekers and whatnot. So if you think about that group itself, and to be able to support them clearly with the systems that we have its just unsustainable. But the new technologies are clearly going to show us a way that we had never forecast, and I have to say I had to throw up my 10 year plan. And now I'm working my way down from 10 to nine to eight year plans going forward. And so its exciting and nerve wracking sometimes, but then, obviously as a change leader, our goal is to get there as quickly as possible. So the benefits of all these solutions can make a difference in people's lives. >> What's interesting is that you can shorten that timetable, but also frees you up to be focused on what's contemporary and what's needed at the time to leverage the people and the resources you have. And take advantage of that versus having something that you're sitting on that's needs to be refreshed, you can always be on that bleeding edge. And this just brings up the DevOps kind of mindset, agility, the lean startup, the lean company, this is a team effort between Amazon Accenture and ESDC. Its, pass, shoot, score really fast. So this is the new reality. Any commentary from you guys on this, new pass, shoot, score combination because you got speed, you got agility, you're leaner, which makes you more flexible for being contemporary in solving problems? What's your thoughts? >> Yeah. So my perspective on that is most definitely right. I think what we were able to show in what's coming out of a lot of different responses to the pandemic by government is, perfection isn't the most important thing out of the gate, getting something out there that's going to reassure citizens, that's going to allow them to answer their questions or access benefits quickly, is what's becoming more important, obviously, security and privacy, those things are of the utmost importance as well. But its ability to get stuff out there, quickly, test it, change it, test it again, and just always be iterating on the solution. Like I can say what we put out on April 6, within four days, is the backbone of what's out there still today. But we've added an integrated workforce management solution from NICE, and we added some other ISVs to do outbound dialing from Acquia and things like that. So the solution has grown from that MVP. And I think that's one other thing that's going to be a big takeaway. If you're not going to do anything till you got the final end product out there, then its going to be late. So let's go quickly and let's adapt from there. >> Benoit, talk about that dynamic because that's about building blocks, on foundational things and then services. Its the cloud model. >> Yeah, I mean, before the pandemic, I had lunch with Mark Schwartz, which I believe you are quite familiar with. And, I spent an hour and a half with him. We were talking and he was so exciting and energized by what the technologies could do. And I was listening to him and I used to be the chief technology officer for the Government of Canada, right. And so I've seen a lot of stuff and I said, Well, that's really exciting. And I'm sure its possible in some other places, and maybe in some other countries where they didn't have infrastructure and legacy. I guess if I see him again soon. I'll have to apologize for not believing him enough. I think the building blocks of Agile the building blocks sprints and MVPs. I mean, they're enough fundamental to the way we're going to solve our biggest Harriers and scariest problems technologically. And then from a business perspective, service candidate itself has 18,000 employees involved in multiple channels, where the work has always been very lethargic, very difficult. Arduous you make change over years, not months, not days, for sure. And so I think that new method is not only a different way of working, its a completely revamped way of assembling solutions. And I think that the concept of engineering is probably going to be closer to what we're going to do. And I have to borrow the Lego metaphor, but the building blocks are going to be assembled. We know in working, I'm saying this in front of Joel, he doesn't know that yet. (all laughing) (indistinct) partners. We're going to be assembling MVP maps of an entire long program and its going to be iterative, it is going to be designed built, it will be agile as much as we can implement it. But more importantly, as much as we can govern it because the government is... We may have changed a lot, but the government is not necessarily caught on to most of these approaches. But the reality is that, that's where we're heading. And I will say, I'll close perhaps on this answer. The biggest reason for doing that apart from we've proved it is the fact that the appetite inside the organization for that level of mobilization, speed and solutioning, and being engaged rapidly, you just can't take that away from an organization once they've tasted that. If you let them down, well, they'll remember and frankly, they do remember now because they want more of this. And its going to be hard. But its a better hard, better challenge, than the one of having to do things over a decade, then to go fast and to kind of iterate quickly through the challenges and the issues and then move on very much to the next one as rapidly as possible. I think the the other comment I would add is most of this was driven by a client need. And that's not inconsequential because it mobilized everybody to a common focus. If it had been just about, well, we need to get people on side and solutions in place just to make our lives better as providers. Yeah, would it work perhaps, but it would have been different than the mobilization that comes when the client is put in the middle. The client is the focus, and then we drive everyone to that solution. >> Shared success and success is contagious. And when you ride the new wave, you're oh, we need a new board, right? So once you get it, it then spreads like wildfire. This is what we've been seeing. And it also translates down to the citizens because again, being contemporary, none of this just look could feel its success and performance. So as people in business start to adopt cloud. It becomes a nice synergy. This is a key! Joe, take us home here on the Accenture. The award winner, you guys did a great job. Final thoughts. >> Yeah, I mean, I think final thoughts would be happy to have had the opportunity to help. And it was a it was a complete team effort and continues to be. Its not a bunch of eccentric technologists in the background doing this. The commitment from everyone to get this in place and to continue to improve it from Benoit team and from other folks across the government has been paramount to the success. So its been a fantastic if world win like experience and look forward to continuing to build on it. And it has been well said, I think one thing that's done is its created demand for speed on some of these larger transformations. So I looking forward to continuing to innovate with with Benoit team. >> Well, congratulations for the most innovative Connect Deployment. And because you guys from Canada, I have to use the Hockey-Reference. You get multiple people working together in a cohesive manner. Its pass, shoot, score every time and its contagious. (Benoit laughs) Gentlemen, thank you very much for your time and congratulations for winning the election. Take care! >> Thanks. >> Take care. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's Coverage "AWS Public Sector Partner Awards" show. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE" with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome to the AWS Public Sector Awards Program. This year, AWS partnered with "theCUBE" to interview a selection of the award winners and their clients. My name is Jeff Frick. I'm the GM and host of "theCUBE" and to share more on the award program and this year's winners, I'd like to introduce Sandy Carter, joining us from Seattle. She is the VP Worldwide Public Sector Partners and Programs for AWS. Sandy, great to see you. >> So great to see you too, Jeff. Everything's going well. >> Yeah, exactly. How are you doing? So you're in Seattle, you're sheltering in place, but you're getting through and business moves on and you guys are doing a lot of exciting things based on some of the challenges that have come from COVID. >> Absolutely. And we're even making our logo signs out of Legos to support our home offices. So we're having a blast and we're really helping a lot of our customers and our partners through this time as they are helping us as well. >> Right. So let's jump into it. So you run Partners and Programs. Share with everyone why partners are so important to Amazon and AWS specifically and public sector specifically? >> Yeah, Jeff, the partner business, of course, is critical to public sector. For us, partners represent that overall customer experience. They're often subject matter experts at raising awareness, helping customers evaluate AWS and some of the workloads. They help accelerate procurement, deploy services, and most important, our partners support our customer missions. And mission is almost everything in public sector. Now for us, public sector is not just government, but it's also education, nonprofits, healthcare, depending upon where you are in the world, it could also be travel and transportation or oil and gas. It's a really big mission that our partners go on every day with us in the field and the real world. >> Right, so one of the things that comes up all the time, if anyone's spent any time listening to Amazon content, whether it's Bezos or Andy, talks about customer obsession and this constant drive around customer obsession. Now, I noticed you've got 18 awards and people can see all the awards later today or they can go to the website, but I noticed like a third of your awards are customer obsession. So you've really kind of taken that customer obsession theme, if you will, and pushed it in and through all these awards and award categories. So talk about customer obsession in the context of these awards. >> Well, customer obsession for us is everything. Everything that we do starts with the customer and then works backwards. So if you think about what's been happening during these COVID times, like call center wait times are astronomical, too long. Customers are waiting too long. We've been helping States and local governments and countries really implement artificial intelligence and have that ability to answer calls quickly. That's one example of working backwards from a customer. Another example might be having limited access to data. So Jeff, we've always said, and I know "theCUBE's" always said that data is queen or king, but during COVID, data became so essential. So working backwards from our customers, leaders needed to make emergency decisions and did not have immediate access to data. So we had a lot of partners who said, "Hey, I can help you with that. "I can build a data lake. "I can use analytics to help you get to that data." So those were just some examples of how our partners did some extraordinary things, working backwards from their customer. >> Right, well, the other thing obviously is COVID, we've been at this now since mid-March and there was a lot of challenges that came out of COVID. But the other thing that came out of it is this light switch moment for digital transformation and initiatives that were potentially running or thought about running or moving slow. Suddenly digital transformation came to the top of everybody's priorities because of COVID and they had no other choice. And I noticed you've got a couple of COVID-19 specific winners in your list. I wonder if you can speak to some of the challenges that arose that they responded to, to earn some of these COVID awards. >> Yeah, it was funny, Jeff, I'm sure you saw it too on social media. There was a slide that said, "Who drove your digital transformation? "Was it your CEO, your CIO, your chief marketing officer, "or was it COVID?" And, of course, everybody picked COVID. So some of the areas that our partners focused in on was the failure of some legacy systems that occurred, decade old mission critical systems and websites, failed under the stress because they couldn't go up for the demand like the cloud can. We also saw limited remote access. You and I were chatting before, how do you do remote work? How does that work? So employees had limited access to systems, to tools, to data that they needed. And so our customers were really, again, really in want of a solution for remote work. And we had a lot of partners who really stepped up. And then of course, looking at the tech skills that existed, I'm sure you had people call you. I had people call me saying, "I don't really know how to get on Zoom or WebEx or Chime. "Can you help me?" And our customers experience the same thing. Employees don't have the same level of technical skills. And so we saw partners step up with training systems, for example. I was really impressed with the scrappiness of our partners and the way that they always started with the customer, working backwards. But they pivoted because COVID really did create some of these new opportunities in the marketplace. >> Right. So we've got a full program running at the conclusion of this conversation which people will get to see the winners and see some of the solution providers. And we've got three tracks, like you said, the government, nonprofit and education, and there's 18 award winners. And I wouldn't ask you to pick your favorite kid, but I'm going to ask you to share a couple of favorites amongst these award winners that really jumped out to you. >> Okay, I will but first I'll just say, Jeff, that we did have 18 winners and amongst them, they had over 45 customer references. They averaged over six years of experience with AWS and they spread across every single geo. So I thought that was pretty amazing. They also spanned across a couple of different areas, a set of technical capabilities like AI-ML, migration, you know, having a skill for Amazon Connect, which is our call center. They spread a cost missions that you talked about for education, healthcare, DOD. And then they also had a lot of special focus on migration. This was one of Andy's really big, big themes at re:Invent. And so we wanted to reinforce that as well with our partners. So a couple of highlights. So I'm going to start with migration because that was a really big one for Andy at re:Invent, as well as Teresa, our head of public sector. So one of our award winners is around migration is the Navy and SAP NS2. They were asked to migrate 26 ERPs across 50 landscapes with 60,000 users accessing the data from around the globe or another one of my favorites was the Accenture Award where they help the government of Canada and they help them through some of the employment and social development areas that they need to focus in on, really launching a 2,600 person contact center to help deal with some of the spikes in call volumes and other areas. And then let me see. I would also call out Maxar. Maxar set up a high performance computing or HPC environment for a number of weather prediction areas for NOAA, which was also very essential because it wasn't just COVID. Right now, we're in the midst of hurricane season. And how can you optimize that performance and cost even more? Or my last one I'll do, I promise, Jeff, is mission-based, which is Tyler Technologies and they help the city of Alvin in Texas and their municipal courts. Like how do you continue to do court systems? How do you implement a virtual court? And that's exactly what Tyler technology helped to have happen in Texas. So those are just some of the favorite ones that I have today, Jeff. >> (laughs) That's great. And again, everybody can watch interviews with the selection of these people. They'll be running, starting at the bottom of the hour and really get to meet the solution providers as well as the customers that put some of these things in. I've been fortunate to cover a couple of the AWS IMAGINE shows, which are really small public sector shows around nonprofits and education. And it's pretty amazing, once you get out of the commercial space, some of the things that are being enabled by cloud generally and AWS specifically around things that people aren't thinking, missing children, community colleges and education for quick employment. And there's just so many really meaningful, you said mission type of activities going on out there that you guys support. So that's really exciting to keep up with. So before we close out and let everybody watch the award winners, your priorities for 2020? We're kind of halfway through, it's a very strange year. I'm sure every plan that was written and approved in January got ripped up to shreds (Sandy laughs) by April. So Sandy, what are some of your priorities for what you're working on with partners and programs and public sector for the balance of the year? >> Yeah, I would start out by reemphasizing migration. I think migration is really crucial, taking something that's on premises and moving it to the cloud. And the reason that's so important, moving forward, is that the discussion we just had, Jeff, around digital transformation, the cloud provides you so much on-demand capacity. You can just scale and do so many more things. We're also seeing a big focus on cyber security. A lot of our customers across the globe now need to secure remote education, their call centers, their portals, their elections. So cyber security will continue to be really important. As well as our Amazon Connect area. So Amazon Connect, this amazing call center that we've integrated with salesforce, one of our other award winners continues to grow rapidly as we see more and more demand for that as well. And Jeff, I would be remiss to also not call out the mission areas. So whether that's helping with public safety or whether that is assisting in healthcare or our new telemedicine, just providing that, not just the technology, but the mission help too, really understanding what's required and delivering that will be really important. And Jeff, we can't end the key without talking about #techforgood either, right? >> Right, right. Something that's close to both our hearts. >> (chuckles) So we did have some really cool award winners that I think one, because of that #techforgood. So Axial3D, for instance, really helped out Belfast Hospital. And they won an award for AI-ML because of the way that they help surgeons save lives. And this is, your intro here was really important to me. It's not just about your super power for profit. That's important because you have to stay in business, but that super power for purpose is equally as important. We didn't do an award this time for startups, but we have also been working with Hello Alice who set up an entire, saying a website is too small, but they've used AI and ML through SageMaker to tag stories and help for small businesses and other startups that are diverse either through gender or race or be in veteran-owned. They're doing an amazing thing. So we continue, at Amazon to focus on #techforgood, as I know, you guys do at "theCUBE" as well. >> Right, right. Well, we used to call it a word and the triple line accounting. So it's not only just for profitability, but also for your employees and your constituents, which include your customers and your partners, but also the broader community and doing well for the broader community. And I do think, the younger people today that are entering the workforce have really forced that conversation and raised the status of mission-based activities. And really trying to think beyond just the bottom line, you still need to make money cause you got to pay the bills and keep the lights on, but that shouldn't be the only thing. And it shouldn't be really at the expense of everything else. So that's great to hear. And again, I think that the tech for good angle is a really, really important one. It probably doesn't get enough pub compared to some of the other stuff that we see in the news. So Sandy, congratulations to you and the team for weeding through all the applicants, selecting these 18 lucky winners. And thank you for giving us the opportunity to interview a few of them and share their stories on "theCUBE" and on this program. And, that's what we love, love to do since we can't be together in person as we have been so many times in the past. >> Yeah, so Jeff, if we could just show that slide real quick as we end. As we end, I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart to all of these partners who were here. All 18, you're going to get to hear most of them. I don't want to take away from their thunder, but I know that "theCUBE" has been doing interviews with them and their customers, see and hear the amazing stories that they have and how they really have helped customers beyond what we can normally even expect because they are award winners. So Jeff, thank you and "theCUBE" for helping us to find a way to get their stories out. Because it's not normal times, we didn't have our public conference, but this is a great way to celebrate each and every one of these 18. So I want to say, thank you, congratulations. And from the bottom of my heart, I appreciate all the great work that you're doing. And to the rest of our partners, I hope that I see you on this list in our next award ceremony. >> Alright, well, thank you Sandy, for those kind words. And without further ado, we will end this segment, this kickoff and people can jump into the award-winner segments and learn lots. And hopefully, it won't be too long, Sandy, till we can actually meet again in-person. So thank you for watching this portion and enjoy the rest of the show. (calm music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE" with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome to the AWS Public Sector Awards Program. This year, AWS partnered with "theCUBE" to interview a selection of the award winners and their clients. My name is Jeff Frick. I'm the GM and host of "theCUBE" and to share more on the award program and this year's winners, I'd like to introduce Sandy Carter, joining us from Seattle. She is the VP Worldwide Public Sector Partners and Programs for AWS. Sandy, great to see you. >> So great to see you too, Jeff. Everything's going well. >> Yeah, exactly. How are you doing? So you're in Seattle, you're sheltering in place, but you're getting through and business moves on and you guys are doing a lot of exciting things based on some of the challenges that have come from COVID. >> Absolutely. And we're even making our logo signs out of Legos to support our home offices. So we're having a blast and we're really helping a lot of our customers and our partners through this time as they are helping us as well. >> Right. So let's jump into it. So you run Partners and Programs. Share with everyone why partners are so important to Amazon and AWS specifically and public sector specifically? >> Yeah, Jeff, the partner business, of course, is critical to public sector. For us, partners represent that overall customer experience. They're often subject matter experts at raising awareness, helping customers evaluate AWS and some of the workloads. They help accelerate procurement, deploy services, and most important, our partners support our customer missions. And mission is almost everything in public sector. Now for us, public sector is not just government, but it's also education, nonprofits, healthcare, depending upon where you are in the world, it could also be travel and transportation or oil and gas. It's a really big mission that our partners go on every day with us in the field and the real world. >> Right, so one of the things that comes up all the time, if anyone's spent any time listening to Amazon content, whether it's Bezos or Andy, talks about customer obsession and this constant drive around customer obsession. Now, I noticed you've got 18 awards and people can see all the awards later today or they can go to the website, but I noticed like a third of your awards are customer obsession. So you've really kind of taken that customer obsession theme, if you will, and pushed it in and through all these awards and award categories. So talk about customer obsession in the context of these awards. >> Well, customer obsession for us is everything. Everything that we do starts with the customer and then works backwards. So if you think about what's been happening during these COVID times, like call center wait times are astronomical, too long. Customers are waiting too long. We've been helping States and local governments and countries really implement artificial intelligence and have that ability to answer calls quickly. That's one example of working backwards from a customer. Another example might be having limited access to data. So Jeff, we've always said, and I know "theCUBE's" always said that data is queen or king, but during COVID, data became so essential. So working backwards from our customers, leaders needed to make emergency decisions and did not have immediate access to data. So we had a lot of partners who said, "Hey, I can help you with that. "I can build a data lake. "I can use analytics to help you get to that data." So those were just some examples of how our partners did some extraordinary things, working backwards from their customer. >> Right, well, the other thing obviously is COVID, we've been at this now since mid-March and there was a lot of challenges that came out of COVID. But the other thing that came out of it is this light switch moment for digital transformation and initiatives that were potentially running or thought about running or moving slow. Suddenly digital transformation came to the top of everybody's priorities because of COVID and they had no other choice. And I noticed you've got a couple of COVID-19 specific winners in your list. I wonder if you can speak to some of the challenges that arose that they responded to, to earn some of these COVID awards. >> Yeah, it was funny, Jeff, I'm sure you saw it too on social media. There was a slide that said, "Who drove your digital transformation? "Was it your CEO, your CIO, your chief marketing officer, "or was it COVID?" And, of course, everybody picked COVID. So some of the areas that our partners focused in on was the failure of some legacy systems that occurred, decade old mission critical systems and websites, failed under the stress because they couldn't go up for the demand like the cloud can. We also saw limited remote access. You and I were chatting before, how do you do remote work? How does that work? So employees had limited access to systems, to tools, to data that they needed. And so our customers were really, again, really in want of a solution for remote work. And we had a lot of partners who really stepped up. And then of course, looking at the tech skills that existed, I'm sure you had people call you. I had people call me saying, "I don't really know how to get on Zoom or WebEx or Chime. "Can you help me?" And our customers experience the same thing. Employees don't have the same level of technical skills. And so we saw partners step up with training systems, for example. I was really impressed with the scrappiness of our partners and the way that they always started with the customer, working backwards. But they pivoted because COVID really did create some of these new opportunities in the marketplace. >> Right. So we've got a full program running at the conclusion of this conversation which people will get to see the winners and see some of the solution providers. And we've got three tracks, like you said, the government, nonprofit and education, and there's 18 award winners. And I wouldn't ask you to pick your favorite kid, but I'm going to ask you to share a couple of favorites amongst these award winners that really jumped out to you. >> Okay, I will but first I'll just say, Jeff, that we did have 18 winners and amongst them, they had over 45 customer references. They averaged over six years of experience with AWS and they spread across every single geo. So I thought that was pretty amazing. They also spanned across a couple of different areas, a set of technical capabilities like AI-ML, migration, you know, having a skill for Amazon Connect, which is our call center. They spread a cost missions that you talked about for education, healthcare, DOD. And then they also had a lot of special focus on migration. This was one of Andy's really big, big themes at re:Invent. And so we wanted to reinforce that as well with our partners. So a couple of highlights. So I'm going to start with migration because that was a really big one for Andy at re:Invent, as well as Teresa, our head of public sector. So one of our award winners is around migration is the Navy and SAP NS2. They were asked to migrate 26 ERPs across 50 landscapes with 60,000 users accessing the data from around the globe or another one of my favorites was the Accenture Award where they help the government of Canada and they help them through some of the employment and social development areas that they need to focus in on, really launching a 2,600 person contact center to help deal with some of the spikes in call volumes and other areas. And then let me see. I would also call out Maxar. Maxar set up a high performance computing or HPC environment for a number of weather prediction areas for NOAA, which was also very essential because it wasn't just COVID. Right now, we're in the midst of hurricane season. And how can you optimize that performance and cost even more? Or my last one I'll do, I promise, Jeff, is mission-based, which is Tyler Technologies and they help the city of Alvin in Texas and their municipal courts. Like how do you continue to do court systems? How do you implement a virtual court? And that's exactly what Tyler technology helped to have happen in Texas. So those are just some of the favorite ones that I have today, Jeff. >> (laughs) That's great. And again, everybody can watch interviews with the selection of these people. They'll be running, starting at the bottom of the hour and really get to meet the solution providers as well as the customers that put some of these things in. I've been fortunate to cover a couple of the AWS IMAGINE shows, which are really small public sector shows around nonprofits and education. And it's pretty amazing, once you get out of the commercial space, some of the things that are being enabled by cloud generally and AWS specifically around things that people aren't thinking, missing children, community colleges and education for quick employment. And there's just so many really meaningful, you said mission type of activities going on out there that you guys support. So that's really exciting to keep up with. So before we close out and let everybody watch the award winners, your priorities for 2020? We're kind of halfway through, it's a very strange year. I'm sure every plan that was written and approved in January got ripped up to shreds (Sandy laughs) by April. So Sandy, what are some of your priorities for what you're working on with partners and programs and public sector for the balance of the year? >> Yeah, I would start out by reemphasizing migration. I think migration is really crucial, taking something that's on premises and moving it to the cloud. And the reason that's so important, moving forward, is that the discussion we just had, Jeff, around digital transformation, the cloud provides you so much on-demand capacity. You can just scale and do so many more things. We're also seeing a big focus on cyber security. A lot of our customers across the globe now need to secure remote education, their call centers, their portals, their elections. So cyber security will continue to be really important. As well as our Amazon Connect area. So Amazon Connect, this amazing call center that we've integrated with salesforce, one of our other award winners continues to grow rapidly as we see more and more demand for that as well. And Jeff, I would be remiss to also not call out the mission areas. So whether that's helping with public safety or whether that is assisting in healthcare or our new telemedicine, just providing that, not just the technology, but the mission help too, really understanding what's required and delivering that will be really important. And Jeff, we can't end the key without talking about #techforgood either, right? >> Right, right. Something that's close to both our hearts. >> (chuckles) So we did have some really cool award winners that I think one, because of that #techforgood. So Axial3D, for instance, really helped out Belfast Hospital. And they won an award for AI-ML because of the way that they help surgeons save lives. And this is, your intro here was really important to me. It's not just about your super power for profit. That's important because you have to stay in business, but that super power for purpose is equally as important. We didn't do an award this time for startups, but we have also been working with Hello Alice who set up an entire, saying a website is too small, but they've used AI and ML through SageMaker to tag stories and help for small businesses and other startups that are diverse either through gender or race or be in veteran-owned. They're doing an amazing thing. So we continue, at Amazon to focus on #techforgood, as I know, you guys do at "theCUBE" as well. >> Right, right. Well, we used to call it a word and the triple line accounting. So it's not only just for profitability, but also for your employees and your constituents, which include your customers and your partners, but also the broader community and doing well for the broader community. And I do think, the younger people today that are entering the workforce have really forced that conversation and raised the status of mission-based activities. And really trying to think beyond just the bottom line, you still need to make money cause you got to pay the bills and keep the lights on, but that shouldn't be the only thing. And it shouldn't be really at the expense of everything else. So that's great to hear. And again, I think that the tech for good angle is a really, really important one. It probably doesn't get enough pub compared to some of the other stuff that we see in the news. So Sandy, congratulations to you and the team for weeding through all the applicants, selecting these 18 lucky winners. And thank you for giving us the opportunity to interview a few of them and share their stories on "theCUBE" and on this program. And, that's what we love, love to do since we can't be together in person as we have been so many times in the past. >> Yeah, so Jeff, if we could just show that slide real quick as we end. As we end, I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart to all of these partners who were here. All 18, you're going to get to hear most of them. I don't want to take away from their thunder, but I know that "theCUBE" has been doing interviews with them and their customers, see and hear the amazing stories that they have and how they really have helped customers beyond what we can normally even expect because they are award winners. So Jeff, thank you and "theCUBE" for helping us to find a way to get their stories out. Because it's not normal times, we didn't have our public conference, but this is a great way to celebrate each and every one of these 18. So I want to say, thank you, congratulations. And from the bottom of my heart, I appreciate all the great work that you're doing. And to the rest of our partners, I hope that I see you on this list in our next award ceremony. >> Alright, well, thank you Sandy, for those kind words. And without further ado, we will end this segment, this kickoff and people can jump into the award-winner segments and learn lots. And hopefully, it won't be too long, Sandy, till we can actually meet again in-person. So thank you for watching this portion and enjoy the rest of the show. (calm music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards program. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube here in Palo Alto, California In the remote interviews during this pandemic, we have our remote crews and getting all the stories and celebrating the award winners. And here to feature the most innovative connect deployment. We have a center of Canada and the Department of Employment and Social Development of Canada, known as E S D. C guys. Congratulations, Joel. More Children Censure Canada Managing director and Ben while long sdc of Canada Chief Transformation officer. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. And congratulations on the award. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. >>So, Ashley, during this pandemic, a lot of disruption and a lot of business still needs to go on, including government services. But the citizens and people need to still do their thing. Business got to run, and you got to get things going. But the disruptions caused a little bit of how the user experiences are. So this connect has been interesting. It's been a featured part of where you've been hearing at the Public Sector summit with Theresa Carlson. You guys, this is a key product. Tell us about the award. What is the solution? That disturbing of deserving reward? >>Maybe I'll get I'll go first and then pass it over to Benoit. But I think the solution is Amazon Connect based Virtual Contact Center that we stood up fairly quickly over the course of about four days and really in support of of benefit that the government of Canada was was releasing as part of its economic response to the pandemic. And in the end that, you know, it's a fully functioning featured contact center solution includes an I V r. And, uh, you know, we stood it up for about 1500 to 2000 agents so that that's the crux of the solution. And maybe Benoit can give a bit of insight as to to how it came about so quickly. >>Yeah, happy to actually wear obviously, like every other government, facing enormous pressures at that time to deliver benefits directly to people who were in true need, the jobs are being lost. Our current systems were in trouble because of their age and barricade cake nature. And so the challenge is was quickly how to actually support a lot of people really fast. And so it came through immediately that after our initial payments were made under what was called Canada Emergency Response Benefit, then we have to support our clients directly. And so people turn to the transformation team of all teams. If you wish during a fire firestorm to say, Well, what could you do and how could you help? And so we had an established relationship with a number of other system integrators, including Accenture, and we were able to run a competition very rapidly. Accenture one. And then we deployed. And as you all said, in a matter of four days, what for us was a new, exceptional on high quality solution to a significant client problem. And I say that because I think you can imagine how people feel in the endemic of all of all things. But with the uncertainty that comes with the loss of income, loss of jobs, the question of being able to deal with somebody really a human being, as well as to be able to be efficiently answer a very simple but straightforward questions rapidly and with high quality, with pretty fundamental for us. So the people in the groups that were talking through here are talking, speaking to millions of people who were literally being asked to to accept the pavement rapidly and to be able to connect with us quickly. And without this solution, which was exceptionally well done and deployed and of high quality personally, just a technology, uh, solution. I would not have been possible to even answer any of these queries quickly. >>And while that's a great 0.1 of the things that you see with the pandemic it's a disaster in the quote disaster kind of readiness thing. Unforeseen, right? So, like other things, you can kind of plan for things that hypothetical. You've got scenarios, but this >>is >>truly a case where every day counts. Every minute counts because humans are involved is no our ROI calculation. It's not like it's not like, Well, what's the payback of our system? The old kind of way to think this is really results fast. This is what cloud is all about. This is the promise of cloud. Can I stand up something quick and you did it with a partner. Okay, this is, like, not, like, normal again. It's like it's, you know, it's like, unheard of, right? Four days with critical infrastructure, critical services that were unforeseen. Take us through what was going on in the war room, as you guys knew this was here. Take us through the through what happened. Yeah, >>So I think I can start a Z. You can imagine the set of executives that we're seeing a payment process. Uh, was an exceptional. It was like a bunker. Frankly, for about two weeks, we had to suspend the normal operations off the vast majority of our programming. We had to launch brand new payments and benefits systems and programs that nobody had seen before. The level of simplicity was maximized to delivered the funds quickly. So you could imagine it's a warpath if you wish, because the campaign is really around. A timing. Timing is fundamental. People are are literally losing their jobs. There is no support. There's no funding money for them to be able to buy groceries. So on the trust that people have in the government, Ai's pretty much at risk right there and then in a very straightforward but extraordinarily powerful magic moment. If you wish. If you can deliver a solution, then you make a difference for a long time. And so the speed unheard off on old friends when he came to the call center capability and the ability for us to support and service context the clients that were desperate to reach us on. We're talking hundreds of thousands of calls, right? We're not talking a few 1000 year. Ultimately, at some point we were literally getting in our over over, taken by volumes, call centers. But we had a regular one still operating over a 1,000,000 calls for coming in today with the capacity to answer, um, you know, tens of thousands. And so the reality is that the counselor that we put up here very quickly became capable of answering more calls than our regular costumes. And that speaks to the speed of delivery, the quality of the solution, of course, but the scalability of it and I have to say, maybe unheard of, it may be difficult to replicate. The conditions to lead to this are rare, but I have to say that my bosses and most of the government is probably now wondering why we can't do this more often, like we can't operate with that kind of speed and agility. So I think what you've got is a client in our case, under extreme circumstances. Now, realizing the new normal will never be the same, that these types of solutions and technology. And then there's scalability. There's agility there, the speed of deployment. It's frankly, something we want. We want all the time. Now we'd like to be able to do it under your whole timeline conditions. But even those will be a fraction of what it used to take. It would have taken us well, actually, I can actually tell you because I was the lead, Ah, technologists to deploy at scale for the government. Canada all the call center capabilities under a single software as a service platform. It took us two years to design it two years to procure it and five years to install it. That's the last experience. We have a call center enterprise scale capabilities, and in this case, we went from years to literally days. >>Well, you know, it takes a crisis sometimes to kind of wire up the simplicity solution that you say. Why didn't we do this before? You know, the waterfall meetings, Getting everyone arguing gets kind of gets in the way of the old the old software model. I want to come back to the transformation been wanna minute, cause I think that's gonna be a great success story and some learnings, and I want to get your thoughts on that. But I want to go to Joel because Joel, we've talked to many Accenture executives over the years and most recently this past 24 months. And the message we've been hearing is we're going to be faster. We're not going to be seen as that. You know, a consulting firm taking our times. Try and get a pound of flesh from the client. This is an example. In my opinion of a partner working with a problem statement that kind of matches the cloud speed. So you guys have been doing this. This is not new to a censure. So take us through how you guys reacted because one you got to sync up and get the cadence of what, Ben? What I was trying to do sync up and execute. Take us through what happened on your side. >>Yeah, I mean, so it's It's Ah, it's an unprecedented way of operating for us as well, frankly, and, um and, uh and, you know, we've had to look at to get this specific solution at the door and respond to an RFP and the commercial requirements that go with that way. Had Teoh get pretty agile ourselves internally on on how we go through approvals, etcetera, to make sure that that we were there to support Ben Wan is team. And I think you know that we saw this is a broader opportunity to really respond to it, to help Canada in a time of need. So So I think we, you know, we had to streamline a lot of our internal processes that make quick decisions that normally even for our organization, would have taken, um, could it could have taken weeks, right? And we were down to hours in a lot of instances. So it helps. It forces us to react and act differently as well. But I mean, to Benoit's point, I think this is really going to to hopefully change the way it illustrates the art of the possible and hopefully will change How, How quick We can look at problems and and we reduced deployment timeframes from from years to months and months to weeks, etcetera for solutions like this. Um, and I think that the AWS platform specifically in this case but what touched on a lot of things to beat the market scale ability But just as the benefit itself was, you know has to be simplified to do this quickly. I think one of the one of the benefits of the solution itself is it's simple to use technologically. I mean, we know least retrained. As I said, I think 1600 agents on how to use the platform over the course of a weekend on and and were able, and they're not normal agents. These were people who are firm from other jobs, potentially within the government. So they're not necessarily contact center agents by training. But they became contact center agents over the course of 48 hours, and I think from that perspective, you know, that was important as well have something that people could could use. The answer those calls that we know that when you were gonna come so >>Ben what this is. This is the transformation dream scenario in the sense of capabilities. I know it's under circumstances of the pandemic, and you guys didn't solve a big, big problem really fast and saved lives and help people get on with their day. But transformations about having people closest to the problem execute and the the also the people equation people process technology, as they say, is kind of playing out in real time. This >>is >>the this is kind of the playbook, you know? Amazon came in said, Hey, you want to stand something up? You wired it together. The solution quickly. You're close to it. Looking back now, it's almost like, Hey, why aren't we doing this before? As you said and then you had to bring people in who weren't trained and stood them up and they were delivering the service. This >>is >>the playbook to share your thoughts on this, because this is what you're you're thinking about all the time and it actually playing out in real time. >>Well, I would definitely endorsed the idea that it's a playbook. It's I would say it's an ideal and dream playbook timidly showing up on the basketball court with all the best players in the entire league playing together magically, it is exactly that. So a lot of things have to happen quickly, but also, um, correctly because you know, you can't pull these things properly together without that. So I would say the partnership with the private sector here was fundamental, and I have to applaud the work that Accenture did particularly, I think, as Canadians, we're very proud of the fact that we needed to respond quickly. Everyone was in this, our neighbors, we knew people who were without support and Accenture's team, I mean, all the way up and down across the organization was fundamental and delivering this, but also literally putting themselves into, uh, these roles and to make sure that we would be able to respond quickly to do so. I think the playbook around the readiness for change I was shocked into existence every night. I won't talk about quantum physics, but clearly some some high level of energy was thrown in very quickly, mobilized everybody all at once. Nobody was said. He's sitting around saying, I wonder if we have change management covered off, you know this was changed readiness at its best. And so I think for me from a learning perspective, apart from just the technology side, which is pretty fundamental if you don't have ready enough technology to deploy quickly than the best paid plans in the world won't work. The reality is that to mobilize an organization going for it into that level of of spontaneous driving, change, exception, acceptance and adoption is really what I would aim for. And so our challenge now we'll be continuing that kind of progression going forward, and we now found the way. We certainly use the way to work with private sector in an innovative capacity in the new, innovative ways with brand new solutions that are truly agile and and and scalable to be able to pull all of the organization. All that one's very rapidly, and I have to admit that it is going to shift permanently our planning. We had 10 year plans for our big transformation, so some of our programs are the most important in the country. In many ways. We support people about eight million Canadians a month and on the benefits payments that we deliver, and they're the most marginal needed meeting and and requires our support from senior study, unemployed jobseekers and whatnot. So if you think about that group itself and to be able to support them clearly with the systems that we have is just unsustainable. But the new technologies are clearly going to show us the way that we had never for forecast. And I have to say I had to throw up, like in your plan. And now I'm working my way down from 10 denying date your plants going forward. And so it's exciting and nerve wracking sometimes, but then obviously has a change leader. Our goal is to get there as quickly as possible, so the benefit of all of these solutions could make a difference in people's lives. >>What's interesting is that you can shorten that timetable but also frees you up to be focused on what's contemporary and what's needed at the time. So leverage the people on the resource is You have and take advantage of that versus having something that you're sitting on that need to be refreshed. You can always be on that bleeding edge, and this brings up the Dev ops kind of mindset agility. The lean startup glean company. You know this is a team effort between Amazon and center and SDC. It's pass, shoot, score really fast. So this isn't the new, the new reality. Any commentary from you guys on this, you know, new pass shoot score combination. Because you got speed, you got agility. You're leaner, which makes you more flexible for being contemporary and solving problems. What's your thoughts? >>So my perspective on that is most definitely right. I think what we what we were able to show and what's. You know, what's coming out of a lot of different responses to the pandemic by government is, um, you know, perfection isn't the most important thing out of the gate. Getting something out there that's going to reassure citizens that's gonna allow them to answer their questions or access benefits quickly is what's becoming more important. Obviously, security and privacy. Those things are of the utmost importance as well. But it's ability to get stuff out there, quickly, test it, change it, tested again and and just always be iterating on the solutions. Like I can say what we put out on April 6th within four days is the backbone of what's out there still today. But we've added, you know, we added an integrated workforce management solution from Nice, and we added some other eyes views to do outbound dialing from acquisition, things like that. So the solution has grown from that M v p. And I think that's one other thing that that's going to be a big takeaways if you're not gonna do anything. So you got the final and product out there, then it's going to be here, right? So let's go quickly and let's adapt from there. >>Then we'll talk about that dynamic cause that's about building blocks, fund foundational things and then services. It's the cloud model. >>Yeah, I mean, before the pandemic, I had lunch with Mark Schwarz, which I believe you're quite familiar with, and, you know, I spent an hour and 1/2 with it. We were talking, and he was so exciting and and energized by what the technologies could do. And I was listening to him, and I used to be the chief technology officer for the government can right? And so I've seen a lot of stuff and I said, Well, that's really exciting, and I'm sure it's possible in some other places. And maybe it's some other countries where you know they didn't have infrastructure and legacy. I guess if I see him again soon, I'll have to. I apologize for not believing him enough, I think the building blocks of edge of the building, blocks of sprints and MVP's I mean they're not fundamental to the way we're gonna. So our biggest, various and scariest problems, technologically and then from a business perspective, Service candidate itself has 18,000 employees involved in multiple channels where the work has always been very lethargic, very difficult, arduous. You make change over years, not months, not days for sure. And so I think that that new method is not only a different way of working, it's a completely re HVAC way of assembly solutions, and I think the concept of engineering is probably going to be closer to what we're going to do on. And I have to borrow the Lego metaphor, but the building blocks are gonna be assembled. We now and working. I'm saying this in front of goal. He doesn't know that you should practice partners. We're gonna be assembling MPP maps of an entire long program, and it's gonna be iterative. It is gonna be designed, built. It will be agile as much as we can implement it. But more importantly, and punches weaken govern. It is, you know, the government is we may have changed. A lot of the government is not necessarily can count on to Most of these things approaches, But the reality is that that's where we're heading. And I will say, Oh, close. Perhaps on this on this answer. The biggest reason for doing that apart from we've proved it is the fact that the appetite inside the organization for that level of globalization, speed solution ing and being engaged rapidly you just can't take that away from an organization. Must be a piece of that. Uh, if you let them down, well, they'll remember. And frankly, they do remember now, cause they want more and it's gonna be hard. But it's a better heart. Ah, a better challenge that the one of having to do things over a decade, then to go fast and to kind of iterating quickly through the challenges and the issues and then move on very much to the next one as rapidly as possible. I think the other company, I would add is most of this was driven by a client need, and that's not inconsequential because it mobilized everybody to comment focused. If you have been just about, well, you know, we need to get people on side and solutions in place just to make our lives better, it providers. Yeah, it would have worked, perhaps, but it would have been different than the mobilisation It comes when the client is put in the middle, the client is the focus, and then we drive. Everyone's with that solution, >>you know, shared success and success is contagious. And when you ride the new way to oh, we need a new board, right? So once you get it, it then spreads like wildfire. This is what we've been seeing. And it also translates down to the citizens because again, being contemporary, none of us just looked could feel it's success in performance. So, as you know, people in business start to adopt cloud. It becomes a nice, nice, nice synergy. This is key. I'll take a year on a center. Um, the award winner. You guys did a great job. Final thoughts. >>Yeah. I mean, I think final thoughts would be happy to have the opportunity that help. And it was a It was a complete team effort and continues to be, um, it's not. It's not a bunch of Accenture technologists in the background in this, you know the commitment from everyone to get this in place. And can you continue to improvement from Benoit's team and from other folks across the government has been, uh, has been paramount to the success. So, um um, it's been a fantastic if world win like experience and, uh, look forward to continuing to build on it. And it has been said, I think one thing this is done is it's created demand for speed on some of these larger transformations. So I'm looking forward to continuing to innovate with with Ben wanting. >>Well, congratulations. The most innovative connect deployment. And because you guys from Canada, I have to use the hockey reference. You get multiple people working together in a cohesive manner. It's pass, shoot, score every time. And you know it's contagious. Thank you very much for your time. And congratulations for winning the >>West. Thanks. Thank you. Okay, this is the >>Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Award show. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards program. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube here in Palo Alto, California In the remote interviews during this pandemic, we have our remote crews and getting all the stories and celebrating the award winners. And here to feature the most innovative connect deployment. We have a center of Canada and the Department of Employment and Social Development of Canada, known as E S D. C guys. Congratulations, Joel. More Children Censure Canada Managing director and Ben while long sdc of Canada Chief Transformation officer. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. And congratulations on the award. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. >>So, Ashley, during this pandemic, a lot of disruption and a lot of business still needs to go on, including government services. But the citizens and people need to still do their thing. Business got to run, and you got to get things going. But the disruptions caused a little bit of how the user experiences are. So this connect has been interesting. It's been a featured part of what we've been hearing at the public sector summit with Theresa Carlson. You guys, this is a key product. Tell us about the award. What is the solution? That disturbing of deserving reward? >>Maybe I'll get I'll go first and then pass it over to Benoit. But I think the solution is Amazon. Connect a spiritual contact center that we stood up fairly quickly over the course of about four days and really in support of of benefit that the government of Canada was was releasing as part of its economic response to the pandemic. And in the end that, you know, it's a fully functioning featured contact center solution includes an ai VR and, uh, you know, we stood it up for 1500 to 2000 agents so that that's the crux of the solution. And maybe Benoit can give a bit of insight as to to how it came about so quickly. >>Yeah, I'd be happy to actually wear obviously, like every other government, facing enormous pressures at that time to deliver benefits directly to people who were in true need, the jobs are being lost. Our current systems were in trouble because of their age in the arcade cake Nature. And so the challenge is was quickly how to actually support a lot of people really fast. And so it came through immediately that after our initial payments were made under what was called Canada Emergency Response Benefit, then we have to support our clients directly. And so people turn to the transformation team of all teams. If you wish during a fire firestorm to say, Well, what could you do and how could you help? And so we had an established relationship with a number of other system integrators, including Accenture, and we were able to run a competition very rapidly. Accenture one. And then we deployed in, as you all said, in a matter of four days, what for us was a new, exceptional on high quality solution to a significant client problem. And I say that because I think you can imagine how people feel in that endemic of all of all things. But with the uncertainty that comes with the loss of income, loss of jobs, the question of being able to deal with somebody really a human being, as well as to be able to be efficiently answer a very simple but straightforward questions rapidly and with high quality, with pretty fundamental for us. So the people in the groups that were talking through here are talking, speaking to millions of people who were literally being asked to to accept the pavement rapidly and to be able to connect with us quickly. And without this solution, which was exceptionally well done and deployed and of high quality personally, just a technology, uh, solution. I would not have been possible to even answer any of these queries quickly. >>And while that's a great 0.1 of the things that you see with the pandemic it's a disaster in the quote disaster kind of readiness thing. Unforeseen, right? So, like other things, you can kind of plan for things that hypothetical. You've got scenarios, but this >>is >>truly a case where every day counts. Every minute counts because humans are involved is no our ROI calculation. It's not like it's not like, Well, what's the payback of our system? The old kind of way to think this is really results fast. This is what cloud is all about. This is the promise of cloud. Can I stand up something quick and you did it with a partner. Okay, this is, like, not, like, normal again. It's like it's, you know, it's like, unheard of right? Four days with critical infrastructure, critical services that were unforeseen. Take us through what was going on in the war room, as you guys knew this was here. Take us through the through what happened. Yeah, >>So I think I can start a Z. You can imagine the set of executives that we're seeing a payment process. Uh, was an exceptional. It was like a bunker. Frankly, for about two weeks, we had to suspend the normal operations off the vast majority of our programming. We had to launch brand new payments and benefits systems and programs that nobody had seen before. The level of simplicity was maximized to delivered the funds quickly. So you could imagine it's a warpath if you wish, because the campaign is really around. A timing. Timing is fundamental. People are are literally losing their jobs. There is no support. There's no funding money for them to be able to buy groceries. So on the trust that people have in the government, Ai's pretty much at risk right there and then, in a very straightforward but extraordinarily powerful magic moment. If you wish. If you can deliver a solution, then you make a difference for a long time. And so the speed unheard off on old friends when he came to the call center capability and the ability for us to support and service context the clients that were desperate to reach us on. We're talking hundreds of thousands of calls, right? We're not talking a few 1000 year. Ultimately, at some point we were literally getting in our over over, taken by volumes, call centers, but we had a regular one still operating over a 1,000,000 calls for coming in today. Uh, with the capacity to answer, um, you know, tens of thousands. And so the reality is that the counselor that we put up here very quickly became capable of answering more calls than our regular costumes. And that speaks to the speed of delivery, the quality of the solution, of course, but the scalability of it and I have to say, maybe unheard of, it may be difficult to replicate. The conditions to lead to this are rare, but I have to say that my bosses and most of the government is probably now wondering why we can't do this more often like we can't operate with that kind of speed and agility. So I think what you've got is a client in our case, under extreme circumstances. Now, realizing the new normal will never be the same, that these types of solutions and technology. And then there's scalability. There's agility there, the speed of deployment. It's frankly, something we want. We want all the time. Now we'd like to be able to do it under your whole timeline conditions. But even those will be a fraction of what it used to take. It would have taken us well, actually, I can actually tell you because I was the lead. Ah, technologist, to deploy at scale for the government, Canada, all the call center capabilities under a single software as a service platform. It took us two years to design it. Two years to procure it and five years to install it. That's the last experience. We have a call center enterprise scale capabilities, and in this case, we went from years to literally days. >>Well, you know, it takes a crisis sometimes to kind of wire up the simplicity solution that you say. Why didn't we do this before? You know the waterfall meetings, Getting everyone arguing gets kind of gets in the way of the old, the old software model. I want to come back to the transformation been wanna minute, cause I think that's going to be a great success story and some learnings, and I want to get your thoughts on that. But I want to go to Joel because Joel we've talked to many Accenture executives over the years and most recently this past 24 months, And the message we've been hearing is we're going to be faster. We're not going to be seen as that. You know, a consulting firm taking our times. Try and get a pound of flesh from the client. This is an example, in my opinion of a partner working with the problem statement that kind of matches the cloud speed. So you guys have been doing this. This is not new to a censure. So take us through how you guys reacted because one you got to sync up and get the cadence of what? Ben? What I was trying to do, sync up and execute. Take us through what happened on your side. >>Yeah. I mean, so it's It's Ah, It's an unprecedented way of operating for us as well, frankly, and, um and, uh and, you know, we've had to look at to get this specific solution at the door and respond to an RFP and the commercial requirements that go with that way. Had Teoh get pretty agile ourselves internally on on how we go through approvals, etcetera, to make sure that that we were there to support Ben Wan is team. And I think you know that we saw this is a broader opportunity to really respond to it, to help Canada in a time of need. So So I think we, you know, we had to streamline a lot of our internal processes and make quick decisions that normally, even for our organization, would have taken, um, could it could have taken weeks, right? And we were down to hours in a lot of instances. So it helps. It forces us to react and act differently as well. But I mean, to Benoit's point, I think this is really going to to hopefully change the way it illustrates the art of the possible and hopefully will change how, How quickly we can look at problems and and we reduce deployment timeframes from from years to months and months to weeks, etcetera for solutions like this. Um, and I think that the AWS platform specifically in this case but what touched on a lot of things to beat the market scale ability But just as the benefit itself was, you know has to be simplified to do this quickly. I think one of the one of the benefits of the solution itself is it's simple to use technologically. I mean, we know least retrained. As I said, I think 1600 agents on how to use the platform over the course of a weekend on and and were able, and they're not normal agents. These were people who are firm from other jobs, potentially within the government. So they're not necessarily contact center agents by training. But they became contact center agents over the course of 48 hours that I think from that perspective, you know, that was important as well have something that people could could use. The answer those calls that you know that when you're gonna come So, >>Ben, what this is This is the transformation dream scenario in the sense of capabilities. I know it's under circumstances of the pandemic, and you guys didn't solve a big, big problem really fast and saved lives and help people get on with their day. But transformations about having people closest to the problem execute and the the also the people equation. People process technology, as they say, is kind of playing out in real time. This >>is >>the this is kind of the playbook, you know, Amazon came in said, Hey, you want to stand something up? You wired it together. The solution quickly. You're close to it. Looking back now, it's almost like, Hey, why aren't we doing this before? As you said and then you had to bring people in who weren't trained and stood them up and they were delivering the service. This >>is >>the playbook to share your thoughts on this, because this is what you're you're thinking about all the time and it actually playing out in real time. >>Well, I would definitely endorsed the idea that it's a playbook. It's I would say it's an ideal and dream playbook to build like showing up on the basketball court with all the best players in the entire league playing together magically, it is exactly that. So a lot of things have to happen quickly, but also correctly because you know you can't pull these things properly together without that. So I would say the partnership with the private sector here was fundamental. And I have to applaud the work that Accenture did particularly, I think, as Canadians, we're very proud of the fact that we needed to respond quickly. Everyone was in this, our neighbors, we knew people who were without support and Accenture's team, I mean all the way up and down across the organization was fundamental in and delivering this, but also literally putting themselves into, uh, these roles and to make sure that we would be able to respond quickly, do so. I think the playbook around the readiness for change. I was shocked into existence every night. I won't talk about quantum physics, but clearly some some high level of energy was thrown in very quickly, mobilized everybody all at once. Nobody was said. He's sitting around saying, I wonder if we have change management covered off, you know this was changed readiness at its best. And so I think for me from a learning perspective, apart from just the technology side, which is pretty fundamental if you don't have ready enough technology to deploy quickly than the best plans in the world won't work. The reality is that to mobilize an organization going forward into that level of of spontaneous driving, change, exception, acceptance and adoption is really what I would ain't for. And so our challenge Now we'll be continuing that kind of progression going forward, and we now found a way. And we certainly use the way to work with private sector in an innovative capacity and in innovative ways with brand new solutions that are truly agile and and scalable to be able to pull all of the organization. All that one's very rapidly, and I have to admit that it is going to shift permanently our planning. We had 10 year plans for our big transformation, so some of our programs are the most important in the country. In many ways. We support people about eight million Canadians a month and on the benefits payments that we deliver, and they're the most marginal needed meeting and and requires our support from senior studio, unemployed jobseekers and whatnot. So if you think about that group itself and to be able to support them clearly with their systems that we have is just unsustainable. But the new technologies are clearly going to show us the way that we had never for forecast. And I have to say I had to throw up, like in your plan. And now I'm working my way down from 10 denying date your plants going forward. And so it's exciting and nerve wracking sometimes. But then, obviously, as a change leader, our goal is to get there as quickly as possible, so the benefit of all of these solutions could make a difference in people's lives. >>What's interesting is that you can shorten that timetable but also frees you up to be focused on what's contemporary and what's needed at the time. So leverage the people on the resource is You have and take advantage of that versus having something that you're sitting on that need to be refreshed. You can always be on that bleeding edge, and this brings up the Dev ops kind of mindset agility. The lean startup glean company. You know this is a team effort between Amazon and center and SDC. It's pass, shoot, score really fast. So this isn't the new, the new reality. Any commentary from you guys on this, you know, new pass shoot score combination. Because you got speed, you got agility. You're leaner, which makes you more flexible for being contemporary and solving problems. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, So my perspective on that is most definitely right. I think what we what we were able to show and what's. You know, what's coming out of a lot of different responses to the pandemic by government is, um, you know, perfection isn't the most important thing out of the gate. Getting something out there that's going to reassure citizens that's going to allow them to answer their questions or access benefits quickly is what's becoming more important. Obviously, security and privacy. Those things are of the utmost importance as well. But it's ability to get stuff in there, quickly, test it, change it tested again and just always be iterating on the solutions. Like I can say what we put out on April 6th within four days is the backbone of what's out there still today. But we've added, you know, we added an integrated workforce management solution from Nice, and we added some other eyes views to do outbound dialing from acquisition, things like that. So the solution has grown from that M v p. And I think that's one other thing that that's going to be a big takeaways if you're not gonna do anything. So you got the final and product out there, then it's going to be here, right? So let's go quickly and let's adapt from there. >>Then we'll talk about that dynamic cause that's about building blocks, fund foundational things and then services. It's the cloud model. >>Yeah, I mean, before the pandemic, I had lunch with Mark Schwarz, which I believe you're quite familiar with, and, you know, I spent an hour and 1/2 with it. We were talking, and he was so exciting and and energized by what the technologies could do. And I was listening to him, and I used to be the chief technology officer for the government. Can't right. And so I've seen a lot of stuff and I said, Well, that's really exciting, and I'm sure it's possible in some other places. And maybe it's some other countries where you know they didn't have infrastructure and legacy. I guess if I see him again soon, I'll have to. I apologize for not believing him enough, I think the building blocks of agile, the building blocks of sprints and MVP's I mean, they're not fundamental to the way we're going to solve our biggest various and scariest problems technologically and then from a business perspective. Service candidate itself has 18,000 employees involved in multiple channels, where the work has always been very lethargic, very difficult, arduous. You make change over years, not months, not days for sure. And so I think that that new method is not only a different way of working, it's a completely revamped way of assembly solutions, and I think the concept of engineering is probably going to be closer to what we're going to do. Um, and I have to borrow the Lego metaphor, but the building blocks are gonna be assembled. We now and working. I'm saying this in front of goal. He doesn't know that you should practice partners. We're gonna be assembling MPP maps of an entire long program, and it's gonna be iterative. It is gonna be designed, built. It will be agile as much as we can implement it. But more importantly, and punches weaken govern. It is, you know, the government is we may have changed. A lot of the government is not necessarily can count on to Most of these things approaches. But the reality is that that's where we're headed. And I will say, Oh, close. Perhaps on this on this answer. The biggest reason for doing that apart from we've proved it is the fact that the appetite inside the organization for that level of globalization, speed solution ing and being engaged rapidly you just can't take that away from an organization. Must be a piece of that. Uh, if you let them down, well, they don't remember. And frankly, they do remember now, cause they want more and it's gonna be hard. But it's a better heart. Ah, a better challenge that the one of having to do things over a decade, then to go fast and to kind of iterating quickly through the challenges and the issues and then move on very much to the next one as rapidly as possible. I think The other company, I would add, is most of this was driven by a client need, and that's not inconsequential because it mobilized everybody to comment focused. It could have been just about well, you know, we need to get people on side and solutions in place just to make our lives better. It is his providers. Yeah, it would have worked, perhaps, but it would have been different than the mobilisation It comes when the client is put in the middle. The client is the focus. And then we drive. Everyone's with that, >>you know, shared success and and successes contagious. And when you ride the new way to oh, we need a new board, right? So once you get it, it then spreads like wildfire. This is what we've been seeing. And it also translates down to the citizens because again, being contemporary numbers just look and feel. It's success in performance. So, as you know, people in business start to adopt cloud. It becomes a nice, nice, nice synergy. This is key. I'll take a year on a center. Um, the award winner. You guys did a great job. Final thoughts. >>Yeah. I mean, I think final thoughts would be happy to have the opportunity that help. And it was a It was a complete team effort and continues to be, um, it's not. It's not a bunch of Accenture technologists in the background in this, you know the commitment from everyone to get this in place. And can you continue to improvement from Benoit's team and from other folks across the government has been has been paramount to the success. So, um um, it's been a fantastic world win like experience and, uh, look forward to continuing to build on it. And it has been said, I think one thing this is done is it's created demand for speed on some of these larger transformations. So I'm looking forward to continuing to innovate with with Ben wanting. >>Well, congratulations. The most innovative connect deployment. And because you guys from Canada, I have to use the hockey reference. You get multiple people working together in a cohesive manner. It's pass, shoot, score every time. And you know it's contagious. Thank you very much for your time. And congratulations for winning the West. Thanks. Okay, this is the Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Award show. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Yeah, Yeah, >>yeah, yeah, yeah

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. >> Well, welcome back here on theCUBE. We're at AWS re:Invent 2019. And every once in a while, we have one of these fascinating interviews that really reaches beyond the technological prowess that's available today into almost the human fascination of work, and that's what we have here. >> Big story. >> Dave Vellante, John Walls. We're joined by Sebastien De Halleux, who is the CEO, oh, COO, rather, of a company called Saildrone, and what they feature is wind-powered flying robots, and they've undertaken a project called Seabed 2030 that will encompass mapping the world's oceans. 85% of the oceans, we know nothing about. >> That's right. >> And, yeah, they're going to combine this tremendous technology with 100 of these flying drones. So, Sebastien, we're really excited to have you here. Thanks for joining us, and wow, what a project! So, just paint the high-level view, I mean, not to have a pun here, but just to share with folks at home a little bit about the motivation of this and what gap you're going to fill. Then we'll get into the technology. >> So I think, you know, the first question is to realize the role of oceans and how they affect you on land and all of us. Half the air you breathe, half the oxygen you breathe, comes from the ocean. They cover 70% of the planet and drive global weather, they drive all the precipitation. They also drive sea-level rise, which affects coastal communities. They provide 20% of the protein, all the fish that we all eat. So, you know, it's a very, very important survival system for all of us on land. The problem is, it's also a very hostile environment, very dangerous, and so, we know very little about it. Because we study it with a few ships and buoys, but that's really a few hundred data points to cover 70% of the planet, whereas on land, we have billions of data points that are connected. So, that's why we're trying to fundamentally address, is deploying sensors in the ocean using autonomous surface vehicles, what we call Saildrones, which are essentially, think of them as autonomous sailboats, seven meters, 23 feet, long, bright orange thing with a five-meter-tall sail, which is harnessing wind power for propulsion and solar power for the onboard electronics. >> And then you've got sonar attached to that, that is what's going to do the-- >> The mapping itself. >> The underwater mapping, right, so you can look for marine life, you can look for geographical or topographical anomalies and whatever, and so, it's a multidimensional look using this sonar that, I think, is powered down to seven kilometers, right? >> That's right. >> So that's how far down, 20,000, 30,000 feet. >> That's right. >> So you're going to be able to derive information from it. >> You essentially describe it as, you're painting the ocean with sound. >> That's absolutely right, whereas if you wanted to take a picture of land, you could fly an airplane or satellite and take a photograph, light does not travel through water that well. And so, we use sound instead of light, but the same principle, which is that we send those pulses of sound down, and the echo we listen to from the seabed, or from fish or critters in the water column. And so, yes, we paint the ocean with sound, and then we use machine learning to transform this data into biomass, statistical biomass distribution, for example, or a 3-D surface of the seabed, after processing the sound data. >> And you have to discern between different objects, right? I mean, you (laughs) showed one picture of a seal sunbathing on one of these drones, right? Or is there a boat on the horizon? How do you do that? >> It's an extremely hard problem, because if a human is at sea looking through binoculars at things on the horizon, you're going to become seasick, right? So imagine the state of the algorithm trying to process this in a frame where every pixel is moving all the time, unlike on land, where you have at least a static frame of reference. So it's a very hard problem, and one of the first problems is training data. Where do you get all this training data? So our drones, hundreds of drones, take millions of pictures of the ocean, and then we train the algorithm using either labeled datasets or other source of data, and we teach them what is a boat on the horizon, what does that look like, and what's a bird, what's a seal. And then, in some hard cases, when you have a whale under the Saildrone or a seal lying on it, we have a lot of fun pushing it on our blog and asking the experts to really classify it. (Dave and John laugh) You know, what are we looking at? Well, you see a fin, is it a shark? Is it a dolphin? Is it a whale? It can get quite heated. >> I hope it's a dolphin, I hope it's a dolphin. (Sebastien laughs) All right, so, I want to get into the technology, but I'm just thinking about the practical operation of this. They're wind-powered. >> Sebastien: Yes. >> But they just can't go on forever, right? I mean, they have to touch down at some point somehow, right? They're going to hit water. How do you keep this operational when you've got weather situations, you've got some days maybe where wind doesn't exist or there's not enough there to keep it upright, keep it operational, I mean. >> It's a very good question. I mean, the ocean is often described as one of the toughest environments in the universe, because you have corrosive force, you have pounding waves, you have things you can hit, marine mammals, whales who can breach on you, so it's a very hard problem. They leave the dock on their own, and they sail around the world for up to a year, and then they come back to the same dock on their own. And they harvest all of their energy from the environment. So, wind for propulsion, and there's always wind on the ocean. As soon as you have a bit of pressure differential, you have wind. And then, sunlight and hydrogeneration for electrical power, which powers the onboard computers, the sensors, and the satellite link that tells it to get back to shore. >> It's all solar-powered. >> Exactly, so, no fuel, no engine, no carbon emission, so, a very environmentally friendly solution. >> So, what is actually on them, well, first of all, you couldn't really do this without the cloud, right? >> That's right. >> And maybe you could describe why that is. And I'm also interested in, I mean, it's the classic edge use case. >> Sure, the ultimate edge. >> I mean, if you haven't seen Sebastien's keynote, you got to. There's just so many keynotes here, but it should be on your top 10 list, so Google Saildrone keynote AWS re:Invent 2019 and watch it. It was really outstanding. >> Sebastien: Thank you. >> But help us understand, what's going on in the cloud and what's going on on the drone? >> So it is really an AWS-powered solution, because the drones themselves have a low level of autonomy. All they know how to do is to go from Point A to Point B and take wave, current, and wind into consideration. All the intelligence happens shoreside. So, shoreside, we crunch huge amounts of datasets, numerical models that describe pressure field and wind and wave and current and sea ice and all kinds of different parameters, we crunch this, we optimize the route, and we send those instructions via satellite to the vehicle, who then follow the mission plan. And then, the vehicle collects data, one data point every second, from about 25 different sensors, and sends this data back via satellite to the cloud, where it's crunched into products that include weather forecasts. So you and I can download the Saildrone Forecast app and look at a very beautiful picture of the entire Earth, and look at, where is it going to rain? Where is it going to wind? Should I have my barbecue outside? Or, is a hurricane coming down towards my region? So, this entire chain, from the drone to the transmission to the compute to the packaging to the delivery in near real time into your hand, is all done using AWS cloud. >> Yeah, so, I mean, a lot of people use autonomous vehicles as the example and say, "Oh, yeah, that could never be done in the cloud," but I think we forget sometimes, there are thousands of use cases where you don't need, necessarily, that real-time adjustment like you do in an autonomous vehicle. So, your developers are essentially interacting with the cloud and enabling this, right? >> Absolutely, so we are, as I said, really, the foundation for our data infrastructure is AWS, and not just for the data storage, we're talking about petabytes and petabytes of data if you think about mapping 70% of the world, right, but also on the compute side. So, running weather models, for example, requires supercomputers, and this is how it's traditionally done, so our team has taken those supercomputing jobs and brought them into AWS using all the new instances like C3 and C5 and P3, and all this high-performance computing, you can now move from old legacy supercomputers into the cloud, and so, that really is an amazing new capability that did not exist even five years ago. >> Sebastien, did you ever foresee the day where you might actually have some compute locally, or even some persistent-- >> So on the small Saildrones, which is the majority of our fleet, which is going to number a thousand Saildrones at scale, there is very little compute, because the amount of electrical power available is quite low. >> Is not available, yeah. >> However, on the larger Saildrone, which we announced here, which is called the Surveyor-- >> How big, 72 feet, yeah. >> Which is a 72-foot machine, so this has a significant amount of compute, and it has onboard machine learning and onboard AI that processes all the sonar data to send the finished product back to shore. Because, you know, no matter how fast satellite connectivity's evolving, it's always a small pipe, so you cannot send all the raw data for processing on shore. >> I just want to make a comment. So people often ask Andy Jassy, "You say you're misunderstood. "What are you most misunderstood about?" I think this is one of the most misunderstood things about AWS. The edge is going to be won by developers, and Amazon is basically taking its platform and allowing it to go to the edge, and it's going to be a programmable edge, and that's why I really love the strategy. But please, yeah. >> Yeah, no, we talked about this project, you know, Seabed 2030, but you talked about weather forecasts, and whatever. Your client base already, NASA, NOAA, research universities, you've got an international portfolio. So, you've got a whole (laughs) business operation going. I don't want to give people at home the idea that this is the only thing you have going on. You have ongoing data collection and distribution going on, so you're meeting needs currently, right? >> That's right, we supply governments around the world, from the U.S. government, of course, to Canada, Mexico, Japan, Australia, the European Union, well, you name it. If you've got a coastline, you've got a data problem. And no government has ever come and told us, "We have enough ships or enough data on the oceans." And so, we are really servicing a global user base by using this infrastructure that can provide you a thousand times more data and a whole lot of new insights that can be derived from that data. >> And what's your governance structure? Are you a commercial enterprise, or are you going-- >> We are a commercial enterprise, yes, we're based in San Francisco. We're backed by long-term impact venture capital. We've been revenue-generating since day one, and we just offer a tremendous amount of value for a much cheaper cost. >> You used the word impact. There's a lot of impact funds that are sort of emerging now. At the macro, talk about the global impact that you guys hope to have, and the outcome that you'd like to see. >> Yeah, you know, our planetary data is all about understanding things that impact humanity, right? Right now, here at home, you might have a decent weather forecast, but if you go to another continent, would that still be the case? Is there an excuse for us to not address this disparity of information and data? And so, by running global weather model and getting global datasets, you can really deliver an impact at very low marginal cost for the entire global population with the same level of quality that we enjoy here at home. That's really an amazing kind of impact, because, you know, rich and developed nations can afford very sophisticated infrastructure to count your fish and establish fishing quarters, but other countries cannot. Now, they can, and this is part of delivering the impact, it's leveraging this amazing infrastructure and putting it in the hands, with a simple product, of someone whether they live on the islands of Tuvalu or in Chicago. >> You know, it's part of our mission to share stories like this, that's how we have impact, so thank you so much for-- >> I mean, we-- >> The work that you're doing and coming on theCUBE. >> This is cool. We talk about data lakes, this is data oceans. (Dave laughs) This is big-time stuff, like, serious storage. All right, Sebastien, thank you. Again, great story, and we wish you all the best and look forward to following this for the next 10 years or so. Seabed 2030, check it out. Back with more here from AWS re:Invent 2019. You're watching us live, right here on theCUBE. (upbeat pop music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering IBM Think 2019. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back, we're here at Moscone North. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day four of our wall to wall coverage of IBM the Think. The second annual IBM Think, first year at Moscone. Dave Vellante here with Stu Miniman. Eric Herzog is here, he's the CMO of IBM Storage and Sam Werner is the VP of Offering Management for Storage Software at IBM. Guys welcome back to theCUBE. Always good to see ya both. >> Thanks >> Thank you. >> So we were joking yesterday and today, of course multi cloud, the clouds opened, it's been raining, it's been sunny today, so multi cloud is all the rage. Evidently you guys have done some work in multi cloud. Some research that you can share with us. >> Yeah, so couple things. First of all, the storage vision in multi cloud at IBM for years. We work with all the cloud providers including IBM cloud, but we work with Amazon and we work with Azure, we work with Google cloud and in fact our Spectrum Protect, modern data protection product, has about 350 small and medium cloud providers across the world that use it for the engine for their back up as a service. So we've been doing that for a long time, but I think what you're getting is, what we found in a survey multi cloud and I actually had had a panel yesterday and all three of my panelists, including Aetna, use a minimum of five different public cloud providers. So what we're seeing is hybrid is a subset of that, right? On and off, but even if someone is saying, I'm using cloud providers, they're using between five and 10, not counting software as a service because many of the people in the survey didn't realize software as a service is theoretically a type of cloud deployment, right? >> So that's obviously not just the big three or the big five, we're talking about a lot of small guys. Some of the guys maybe you could have used in your Spectrum Protect for back up, local cloud providers, right? And then add sas to that, you could probably double or triple it, right? >> Right, well we've have been very successful with sas providers so for example, one of people on the panel, a company called Follett, they're a privately held, in the mid close to a billion dollars, they provide services to universities and school districts and they have a software package for universities for the bookstores to manage the textbooks and another software as a service for school districts across the United States. They have 1,500 and it's all software service. No on prem licensing and that's an example. That's in my mind, that's a cloud deployment, right? >> Ginni talked Tuesday about chapter two how chapter one was kind of, I call it commodity cloud, but you know, apps that are customer facing, chapter two, a lot of chapter two anyways, is going to be about hybrid and multi cloud. I feel like to date it's largely been, not necessarily a purposeful strategy to go multi cloud, it's just we're multi vendor. Do you see customers actually starting to think about a multi cloud strategy? If so, what's behind that and then more specifically, what are you guys doing from a software stand point to support that? >> Yeah, so in the storage space where we are, we find customers are now trying to come up with a data management strategy in a multi cloud model, especially as they want to bring all their data together to come up with insights. So as they start wanting to build an AI strategy and extend what they're doing with analytics and try to figure out how to get value out of the data they're building a model that's able to consolidate the data, allow them to ingest it and then actually build out AI models that can gain insights from it. So for our software portfolio, we're working with the different types of service providers. We're working closely with all the big cloud providers and getting our software out there and giving our customers flexible ways to move and manage their data between the clouds and also have clear visibility into all the data so they can bring it together. >> You know, I wonder sort of what the catalyst is there? I wrote an article that's going up on SiliconANGLE later and I talked about how the first phase was kind of tire kicking of cloud and then when the down turn hit, people went from capex to opex. It was sort of a CFO mandate and then coming out of the down turn, the lines of business were like, whoa agility, I love this. So shadow IT and then IT sort of bought in and said, "we got to clean up this mess." and that seems to be why, at least one catalyst, for companies saying, "hey, we want a single data management strategy." Are you seeing that or is there more to it? >> Well I think first of all, we're absolutely seeing it and there's a lot of drivers behind it There's absolutely IT realizing they need to get control over this again. >> Governance, compliance, security, edix >> And think about all the new regulations. GDPR's had a huge impact. All a sudden, these IT organizations need to really track the data and be able to take action on it and now you have all these new roles in organizations, like data scientists who want to get their hands on data. How do you make sure that you have governance models around that data to ensure you're not handing them things like pi? So they realized very quickly that they need to have much better control. The other thing you've seen is, the rise of the vulnerabilities. You see much more public attacks on data. You've seen C level executives lose their jobs over this. So there's a lot more stress about how we're keeping all this data safe. >> You're right. Boards are gettin' flipped and it's a big, big risk these days >> Well the other thing you're seeing is legal issues. Canada, the data has to stay in Canada. So if you're multi national and you're a Japanese company, all your Canadian offices, the data has to be some cloud of ours got an office in Canada. So if you're a Japanese headquarter company, using NTT cloud, then you got to use IBM or Amazon or Azure, 'cause you have to have a data center inside the country just to have the cloud data. You also have shier maturity in the market. I would argue, the cloud used to be called the web and before it was the web, it was called the internet and so now that you're doing that, what happens in the bigger companies, procurement is involved, just the way they've been involved in storage servers and networking for a long time. Great you're using CISCO for the network. You did get a quote from HP or using IBM storage, but make sure you get at least one other quote so as that influences aside from definitely getting the control is when procurement get involved, everything goes out for RFP or RFQ or at ten dure, as they say in Europe and you have to have multiple vendors and you sometimes may end up for purely, we need the way to club 'em on price so we need IBM cloud and Microsoft so we can keep 'em honest. So when everyone rushed the cloud, they didn't necessarily do that, but now that it's maturing >> Yeah, it's a sign of maturity. >> It's a sign of maturity that people want to control pricing. >> Alright, so one of the other big themes we've been talking a lot about this week is AI. So Eric talks about, when we roll back the clock, I think back to the storage world, we've been talking about intelligence in storage for longer than my career. So Sam, maybe you can tell us what's different about AI in storage than the intelligence we've been talking and what's the latest about how AI fits into the portfolio? >> Yeah, that's a great question and actually a lot of times we talk about AI and how storage is really important to make the data available for AI, but we're also embedding AI in our storage products. If you think about it, if you have a problem with your storage product, you don't just take down one application. You can take down an entire company, so you've got to make sure your storage is really resilient. So we're building AI in that can actually predict failures before they happen so that our storage never takes any outages or has any down time. We can also predict by looking at behavior out in the network, we can predict or identify issues that a host might be causing on the network and proactively tell a customer before they get the call that the applications are slowing down and we can point out exactly which host is causing the problem. So we're actually proactively finding problems out on the storage network before they become an issue. >> Yeah and Eric, what is it about the storage portfolio that IBM has that makes it a good solution for customers that are deploying AI as an application in use cases? >> Yeah so we look at all, so one is AI, in the box if you will, in the array and we've done a ton of work there, but the other is as the underlying foundation for AI workloads and applications so a couple things. Clearly, AI often is performance dependent and we're focused on all flash. Second thing as Sam already put it out, resilience and availability. If you're going to use AI in an automotive factory to control the supply chain and to control the actual factory floor, you can't have it go down because they could be out tens of millions, hundreds of millions of year just for that day of building Mercedes or Toyotas or whatever they're building if you have an automated factory. The other areas we've created what we call, the data pipeline and it involves three, four members of our storage software family. Our Spectrum Scale, a highly parallel file system that allows incredible performance for AI. Our Spectrum Discover which allows you to use meta data which is information about the data to more accurately plan and the AI software from any vendor can use an API and go in and see this meta data information to make the AI software more efficient that they would use. Our IBM Cloud Object Storage and our Spectrum Archive, you have to archive the data, but easily bring it back because AI is like a human. We are, smart humans are learning non-stop, whether you're five, whether you're 25, or whether you're 75, you're always learning. You read the newspaper, you see of course theCUBE and you learn new things, but you're always comparing that to what you used to know. Are the Russians our friends or our enemies? It depends on your point in time. Do we love what's going on in Germany? It depends on your point in time. In 1944, I'd say probably not. Today you'd say, what a great Democratic country, but you have to learn and so this data pipeline, this loop, our software is on our storage arrays and allows it to be used. We'll even sell the software without our storage arrays for use on any AI server platform, so that softwares really the huge differentiator for us. >> So can you, as a follow up to that, can you address the programmability of your portfolio? Whether it's through software or maybe the infrastructure as well. Infrastructure, I'm thinking infrastructure's code. You mentioned you know API's. You mentioned the ability to go into like Spectrum Discover for example, access meta data. How programmable is your infrastructure and how are you enabling that? >> I mean across our entire portfolio, we build restful API's to make our infrastructure completely extensible. We find that more and more enterprises are looking to automate the deployment of the infrastructure and so we provide API's for programming and deploying that. We're also moving towards containerizing most of our storage products so that as enterprises move towards cubernetes type clusters, we work with both Red Hat and with our own ICP and as customers move towards those deployment models and automate the deployment of their clusters, we're making all of our storage's available to be deployed within those environments. >> So do you see an evolution of the role of a storage admin, from one that's sort of provisioning luns to one that's actually becoming a coder, maybe learning Python, learning how to interact through API's, maybe even at some point developing applications for automation? Is that happening? >> I think there's absolutely a shift in the skills. I think you've got skills going in two directions. One, in the way of somebody else to administer hardware and replace parts as they fail. So you have lower skilled jobs on that side and then I believe that yes, people who are managing the infrastructure have to move up and move towards coding and automating the infrastructure. As the amount of data grows, it becomes too difficult to manage it in the old manual ways of doing it. You need automation and intelligence in the storage infrastructure that can identify problems and readjust. For example, in our storage infrastructure, we have automated data placement that puts it on the correct tier. That use to be something a storage administrator had to do manually and figure out how to place data. Now the storage can do it themselves, so now they need to move up into the automation stack. >> Yeah, so we've been talking about automation and storage also for a lot of years. Eric, how are enterprises getting over that fear that either I'm going to lose my job or you know, this is my business we're talking about here. How do I let go and trust? I love, I saw downstairs, there was a in the automation booth for IBM, it was free the humans, so we understand that we need to go there. We can't not put automation with the scale and how things are moving, but what's the reality out in the field? >> So I think that the big difference is and this is going to sound funny, but the economic down turn of seven, eight and nine, when downturn hit and certainly was all over the IT press, layoff, layoff, layoff, layoff, layoffs, so we also know that storage is growing exponentially, so for example, if I'm Fortune 500 company x and I had 100 people doing storage across the planet. If I laid off 50 of them and now I'm recovered. I'm making tons of money, my IT budget is back up. I didn't go to the CIO and say, you can hire the 50 storage people back. You can hire 50 people back, but no more than five or six can be storage people. Everything else has to be dev ops or something else. So what that means is, they are managing an un-Godly amounts of more storage every year with essentially the same people they had in 2008 or maybe a tiny bit more. So what matters is, you don't manage a peta bite or in the old days, half a peta bite. Now, one storage admin or back up admin or anyone in that space, they want you to manage 20 peta bites and if you don't have automation, that will never happen. >> Stu and I were interviewing Steven Hill from KPMG yesterday and he was talking about the macro numbers show we're not (stutters) as globally and even in the US, we're not seeing productivity gains. I'm saying yeah, you're not looking at the storage business you know, right? Because if you look at anybody who's running storage, they're doing way more with much less, to your point. >> Which is why, so for example when Sam talked about our easy tier, we can tier, not only as AI base. So in the old days, when you guys weren't even born yet, when I was doing it. >> Well I don't know about that >> What was it? It was move the data after 90, so first it was manual movement, then it was set up something, a policy. Remember policy automation was the big deal 10 years ago? Automatically move the data when its 90, 60, or 30 days old. AI based, what we have an easy tier, automatically will determine what tier it should go on, whether when the data's hot or when the data's cold and on top of that, because we can tier over 440 arrays that are not IBM logo'd, multi vendor tiering, we can tier from our box to an EMC box. So if you have a flash array, you've got an old or all hard drive that you've moved into your back up in archive tier, we can automatically tier to that. We can tier from the EMC array out to the Cloud, but it's all done automatically. The admin doesn't do anything, it just says source and target and the AI does all the work. That's how you get the productivity that you're talking about, that you need in storage and back ups even worse because you got to keep everything now, which Sam mentioned GDPR, all these new regulations and the Federal Government its like keep the data forever. >> But in that case, the machine can determine whether or not it's okay to put it in the Cloud, if it's in Canada or Germany or wherever, the machine can adjudicate and make those decisions. >> And that's what the AI, so in that case you're using AI inside of the storage system versus what we talked about with our other software that makes our storage systems a great platform for other AI workloads that are not, if you will, AI for storage. AI for everything else, cars or hospitals or resume analysis. That's what the platform can, but we put all this AI inside of the system 'cause there aren't that big, giant, global, Fortune 500 has 55 storage admins and in 2007 or eight, they had 100, but they've quintupled the amount of storage easily if not 10x'd it, so who's going to manage that? Automation. >> Guys, good discussion. Not everyday, boring, old storage. It's talking about intelligence, real intelligence this time. Eric, Sam, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Great to see you guys again. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. Alright, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest shortly, right after this break. John Furrier is also here. IBM Think, Day four, you're watching theCUBE. Be right back. (tech music)