>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018 brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE. We are live in Washington, D.C. at Amazon Web Services, AWS Public Sector Summit. This is their big event, this is their reinvent for the public sector, but it's technically a summit. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Craig Atkinson who is the CEO of JHC Technologies, small business partner doing huge deals. Great to have you on, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, you guys have a lot of experience working on the front lines with some really big deployments, implementations with cloud, working with some agencies. So, first question right out of the gate is, is this really happening, this cloud thing? >> Yeah absolutely, you know, we started the company in 2010 and one of my partners and I worked on recovery.gov as a cloud engineer and it was just something that, at the time, no one knew what the cloud was and we really looked at it as an opportunity when we started the business. This is where things are going to go. We didn't realize when we started the company, though, as a small business, you can't just get started and say, yeah, we know the cloud and can help you do these things. You have to have past performance, you have to have relationships. And so, it's taken so long for the government to get around to the point where they're really just starting now to put a lot of larger production workloads into the cloud. And it's been a long journey where you've had, it's like Groundhog Day, you have the same conversation over and over again with different people and different organizations about security, about compliance, about a variety of issues, how you procure it and everyone has the same questions, has the same problems and it's so much about education. >> Yeah, and saving time and there's a lot of upfront medicine you got to take. Like you said, if you're new, it's like a jungle, oh, wait a minute, I thought it was going to be easier. What was the key motivational point, how did you keep going, what was the driving force? Was it Amazon tailwind for you, was it more of... >> Our relationship with Amazon Web Services has been great. They've been a tremendous supporter of us. And, as a small business, you know, they really relied on their partners to be a force multiplier for them in the public sector space, And that's been tremendous for us. They've really allowed us to play... >> And that's true, that's actually, they're doing that. >> Absolutely, and not necessarily the case as much on the commercial side where they're more apt to deal directly with the customers. But, they really relied on the partner network, partner ecosystem, on the public sector space to really help them drive things forward. So, for us, to have that relationship has been tremendous value for us. But also, we do things and allow those to broaden the group and what we have from a vehicles perspective, small business set of size that allow us to do business with organizations that AWS can't. >> Well I think I'm going to explain what you guys do, great commentary on the cloud and your opportunity. What do you guys do for services, what kind of services are you providing, and can you take a minute to talk about the company. >> Sure, we started the company in 2010, really it was my two partners and I, we'd been consultants in the IT industry, and worked in the beltway, and felt like we should do a company that was different than everyone else, more of a commercial style focused entity, where it's about the technology and how do you bring that disruptive technology to government and business so that they can take advantage of it as opposed to being overwhelmed by it, and the cloud is really that underlying core technology that really affects, it's really a paradigm shift for how organizations do business. So for us, that's the area we wanted to get into, and we did a lot around mobility, a lot around collaboration, virtualization, virtual apps, virtual desktops, but really at the end of the day, the cloud-- >> Are you guys writing software, are you an integrator? >> Well, we're really, it was about building a company that technologists, who are in this area, there's some great smart people who work in the D.C. area, people will, in the Beltway, you'll sit at a desk, doing a job, for five years, your company will lose that contract to some other company, you'll stay in the same seat, you'll go work for a different company for the next five years. Somebody else will win the contract and you'll stay in that same seat. So, you're really working for the agency and not really working for the company that you're employed by, and we really wanted to build something that was more commercial-esque where it was about what do you bring to me as an organization, how do I put you in a position that you're challenged by the workload that's in front of you that you get to do different things and that you're more upwardly mobile as opposed to just being a butt in a seat, as with a lot of, what work they call it. >> So this morning, Theresa showed a slide, I think I counted 60 consulting partners. Now you guys have achieved a premier consulting partners status, you're not like a everyday name, like some of the big guys that are on there, so how did you achieve that, how do you differentiate, in that sea of really world-class consultants, and how do you achieve that premier status with AWS? >> It's been a lot of work for us. There are some organizations that have gotten it just based off their size. AWS needs to have those larger partners. But we, I think we really did earn it, we've met every requirement to get to that status and for us, it's a huge badge of honor that we've achieved that, and it's a lot of hard work for a small company. We're coming up on 70 employees, so we're not 10,000, 20,000 employee environment, so for us to achieve that and have the level of sales that we do in the space, it's certainly not easy, it's really being singularly focused on the vision of how we want to run the company and sticking to that, even though the market may try to push you other directions, and even your customers say we're not ready for cloud, you have to really stick to it and be focused on that being your core business. >> You talked about moving production workloads to the cloud earlier. I wonder if you could help us sort of squint through that because when you talk to what Andy Jassy calls the Old Guard, John, right, they all say, people aren't moving production workloads to the cloud. When you talk to AWS, you just referenced, production workloads are going into the cloud. I like to talk to consultants that are at least quasi-independent. What's really happening there? What kind of production workloads are going into the cloud? >> I think we're just now hitting that part of the market, where we're starting to see more of the large scale production workloads being moved to the cloud. We moved our first organization, 2500 user environment, that we moved to the cloud three, four years ago, so for us, being able to do that kind of workload to be all in on the cloud, isn't something that we shied away from. But when you started to deal with a lot of these organizations, we have prime contracts with NOAA, which has massive data, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and working with the USGS, some of these agencies have massive data, they're just weren't really built as an organization to be able to adopt that cloud technology, so we really looked at it a couple years ago, and made a bit of a conscious effort to help to push them as an organization to help them understand the structure of how they need to really build their organization. We're very much an I till shop, how you build an IT process, but even with that, it doesn't really take in innovative technology. The speed at which AWS innovates and produces new technology, new features, is something that I don't think that anyone has seen before in an IT realm, so, building an organization that's able to understand that, to be able to implement that technology and be in a compliant manner to make it available to their application owners and their users is something that you really have to have the right organizational structure to be able to achieve. >> And why is that not a problem for AWS customers, your customers, because if a legacy IT vendor, first of all, they can't innovate that fast, but if they were to innovate that fast, they tend to move at a much slower speed, the IT organizations that buy from them. Why is that pace of innovation not problematic for your customers? >> I think it is, and again I think, our challenge has been to help them to build the type of an organization that can respond to that, knowing that there's one constant in IT technology today, which is change. Whatever's here today is going to be different tomorrow. There's going to be new features, and you have to be able to build an organization that isn't just we're going to build a data center, build a bunch of firewalls around it, put our data there and we're going to be safe. Today's IT landscape moves too quickly. You really have to build, look to the way it's done in the commercial enterprises, the way a Netflix builds really to be destructive and how they build their technology, knowing it's going to fail, and look to do that same type of implementation, help build your security within a federal organization. >> You're going to change the culture and process, everything all at once with new tech, so I want to ask you the question that's in everyone's mind, mine included, what's your observation of the current state of affairs with respect to the cloud native and cloud because you've got people who might jump on it, say I love this, some'll be fearful, you're there, what's the new aha moment that people are having, can you share some insight into (laughs) what's going on in the mind and the actual implementations, what's changed, what's the most important story that we should be telling? >> We're right now at that point. I think I've heard reports less than 7% of the data center workloads have been moved to infrastructures of service. I think that's probably even on the high side, 7%, but you're now starting to get all of the work that we've done, a lot of these organizations is they've been pilots, proof of concepts, really dipping their toe, large organizations just dipping their toe in the water. We're getting to the point now where these organizations are approaching their primary applications for their organization saying we're ready to move that too. For us it's a lot, it's been so much education so much work to try to help get them there, so for us we're just excited to actually see it come to fruition. >> In 2010, around the time you started your company, I remember, John, VM Ware, at the time Paul Moritz was saying any app, any workload will run on VM Ware, and there were a lot of skeptics, and they've largely achieved that, remember they used to talk about the software mainframe. You know with the cloud, similar kind of narrative. Now it's a little different now, let's take the example of Oracle in particular, you're seeing Oracle use for example its pricing power to really try to force people to use its own cloud jacking up prices if they want to use it on Amazon. What do you tell customers that are basically reliant on that Oracle database? Should they move that into the cloud, should they try to figure out okay let's go to Aurora or Redshift, or some other better, what's the right strategy? >> So I mean we're a technology agnostic, generally speaking-- >> Right that's why I can trust your answer here. >> But we really do lean to where what we call best in breed technologies. So AWS has been something that we've been all in on AWS since 2011, 2012. We made that a conscious effort and they've really done some things I think as part of their business model that we really appreciate as a partner, and as a customer. We've always had our infrastructure from day one on AWS. Also our infrastructure on Office 365. We understand where to focus those efforts. When it comes to an organization like an Oracle, I don't want to necessarily disparage them, but they're not necessarily focused on bringing the best value to their customers. A lot of times it seems that it's about what's right for the bottom line of their stockholders and what drives up the price of their stock as opposed to what's the best solution I could put forward to really be great at database. I think if you look at it, AWS has already built a roadmap to where you can get 70-80% of your database applications to be migrated to an open software database model, and you can massively reduce, so many of these large organizations, a large portion of their IT spend is on those Oracle and those specialty applications. >> It's the licenses too. >> So if you can drop that cost by 60, 70%. What we always tell those organizations, don't just throw that money away, take those savings, roll that into making a better application. Use that 60, 70% savings and fix how you deliver. Make your data more mobile, make it more available to your userbase. >> Invest in analytics. >> Invest back in how you're doing, using Redshift or whatever other analytics, to get better results. >> Awesome, Craig, great insight, congratulations on your success at JHC Technologies, you're the founder and CEO of, congratulations on all the hard work, you got to just, I don't want to say do your time, I've heard that quoted in the government sector, you got to do your time, time's shrinking with the cloud, so you've got a great opportunity. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much, for having me. >> You're watching theCUBE here live in Washington, D.C. I'm John Furrier, stay with us, day one here is continuing, be right back. (synth music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Washington D.C. It's Cube Conversations, with John Furrier. >> Hello there, welcome to the special Cube Conversation, I'm John Furrier with the Cube here in Washington D.C. at the headquarters of Amazon Web Services Public Sector, here in Arlington, Virginia, right around the corner from D.C. Our next guest is Robert Groat, with the Executive Vice President of Technology at Smartronix, a service provider in Cloud and an IT. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you John. >> So we're in D.C. and the Cube's getting the lay of the land, so much innovation happening around Cloud and disruption, you got one group going, scratching their heads, wondering what's happening, some groups saying what happened, and you got people making it happen, right? >> Exactly. >> What's the big "ah-ha" moment people might not know looking into D.C. now? What is the real trend? What are the people that are making it, what are they doing? Is it the Cloud, is it mobile, is it data-driven? >> Yeah, I think it's all of those components, but I think one of the things that you're really seeing is that the Cloud is enabling these organizations, these traditional organizations, to really transform in the way that they deliver and consume IT services. IT services have been a mess in this town for a long time, the contracting process has been a mess, some of the things that happened, some of the smaller organizations have had a chance to be really innovative and take a leadership role in delivering services to the community and not just the large beltway bandits that we've seen in the past. So I think some of the "ah-ha" moments are probably around, you know, we've been working, Smartronix has been working with the public sector and Cloud since 2009, so really one of the early pioneers, and we used to run across all of these issues where security was the blocker, and it would take a long time to convince people that the security in the Cloud really was what it needed to be. Now we're seeing, in terms of an "ah-ha" moment, we're seeing that security is the enabler, we're seeing that these organizations are really embracing the fact that you can do things in the Cloud from the security perspective that you could never do before. And I think that you've got this kind of next generation of managed service provider that embraces those tenants of how to manage services and manage security services and it's really disrupting the way that the Federal Government's done business in the past. >> You know, we were at the Public Sector Summit last June, and we were commeters, the first time the Cube was at an event, which we had been to other ones before that, but it was very clear to me that we're in a no-excuses government at this point, cause there's a lot of forcing functions. You have one, connected social media, and everyone's like hey, why can't I do that over there? It's like the old iPhone moment on the enterprise. Why can't I bring me iPhone to work? You know, years ago, right? >> Exactly. >> Now you have security looking down the barrel, and IOT happening, and you don't have a thing, so you have Swiss cheese called malware, attacking every hole, every corner of the network potentially is compromised. >> Exactly. >> So security is forcing, and we're at cyberwar. >> We are! >> You can't deny that, so why isn't the Congress emergency funding for more security, or is it happening? >> Well, they need to be, but if you look at, if you look at the way traditional data centers are built and on-premise infrastructure is built, you had a variety of contractors coming in, each kind of doing their own thing, you had this heterogeneous infrastructure that was all built and kind of tangled together, and there wasn't this great way of being able to look at Cloud services or be able to look at a Greenfield environment, and have everything that's happening in that environment aware to you. And that's really what the Cloud is enabling. You're actually. >> You mean program the whole infrastructure? >> Programmable infrastructure, exactly. You're actually, every single thing that happens in a Cloud environment ends up being an API call. Each one of those API calls ends up being logged, and when you have every event that's happening in your environment, you don't have that in a traditional data center. When you have every event that's happening in that environment, and you can apply some of these new primatives that AWS is providing around machine learning and AI, now you're using those to attack those vectors that you're talking about, to protect critical infrastructure, really in ways that you couldn't do before, and you can actually, with this programmable infrastructure, you can actually really look at being able to respond to events, and have autonomic response and remediation of these events. So when something happens, you've programmatically defined how you're going to respond to those events, and it's repeatable. >> Yeah, one of the things I'll share with you, I did an interview with, I think it was the CTO or the CSO of Fortinet, which is a security vendor, >> Mhmm. >> And we were talking, and we were totally geeking out, he was like the complexity of the Cloud actually is an advantage in the security, and I said what do you mean by that? He goes, most of the hackers will focus the main payload of their vector on one particular item, and that's where all their energy, if they have to hunt too far, they kind of give up.6 >> It's just like on the battlefield. The surface area of attack matters, and when you have such a wide, vast surface area of attack, there's no way for them to. >> So you agree with that? >> 100% agree with that. >> How is that, how do I turn that complexity, obviously there's a main range of tools to make the Cloud easier, but complexity of scale, how do I turn that as an IT person or a manager, or an executive, into a security advantage? What do I do? >> So the security advantage is that every time you build a rule, every time you think about compliance and maintaining compliance for your organization, you're actually starting to build knowledge and a new capability. That can be applied programmatically now, across your entire set of enclaves that you use for managing infrastructure, so when we develop one thing as a manage service provider, to make sure we're meeting some kind of compliance mandate, that now can be shared across all of our clients in the space, and this can start to really help create that protective ops infrastructure. >> So you scale more observation space to get more data, that gives you also an advantage. >> It does, it does. And then when you can actually take that data and use it to train to understand where these advance persistent threats are, you can then really start to do things, that this was the province of really large organizations, only in the past. And now AWS has democratized that ability to use these tools around artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve security. >> Robert, you can't go back five years without hearing, are you kidding me, that Cloud is insecure. Turns out, Cloud is becoming a better security paradigm than building on site because of human error or other force majors or any kind of other acts. >> That's exactly right. Anybody who's looking at it from a security perspective and thinks that they can have the same kind of security that, you know, a multi-billion dollar company like AWS can provide, they're mistaken. And the main thing around that is, they don't have transparency to every event happening in that environment, and that's what you get when you start to utilize Cloud services. >> Yeah, I think Verizon was the first company that notified me that this might be the trend. I think this was like a 2011 time-frame. Don't discount a multi-tenant Cloud. >> Exactly. >> Like okay, and they realized and have been tracking that like okay, so big trends in technology, tailwinds and headwinds. What trends are tailwinds for the growth, and what are the headwinds, what's the blockers? >> Well the tailwinds is the fact that I think everybody's kind of not resigned to the fact, but they're seeing the Cloud first as probably a strategy that they should take. And, you know, we've seen the government be laggards in the past with adopting new technology, I think what they're seeing now, especially in the Department of Defense, and then some of the Federal organizations that we're working with, they're actually seeing that perhaps their adversaries are having a competitive advantage by moving into the Cloud, maybe they should look at the competitive advantages that they should have moving into the Cloud infrastructure. Not just security, but the ability to be innovative and agile and deliver services much faster than they've ever been able to deliver them before. >> Well we had a different approach and automated actual code bases so that you can actually deploy services and automatically code them up with glue instantly, so it's interesting. >> That is one of the fundamental things, that when you start looking at infrastructure's code, and you look at things that you can make repeatable in these environments, then look at how many times the government's probably built out a particular enterprise software staff, whether it's Share-A-Plan or >> Authentication. >> It all gets repeated, once that gets cauterized and done right with the right subject-matter experts, then you can start to create service catalogs that these organizations can use and rapidly deploy things in a repeatable and manageable fashion. >> This is an open-source ethos. >> It is. >> We're on the shoulders of others, why replicate something that's already a service, throw it in a service catalog, make it a micro-service, make it an API. >> And that culture's finally transformed in the Federal Government, that didn't used to be the culture, right? >> People must be like, finally! >> It used to be, I have to have my arms wrapped around this, I have to be able to understand everything that's happening, and you would always hear some of these larger organizations say, you know, I don't want to have vendor lock-in. Even now sometimes, you'll see it a little bit. I don't want go with, maybe AWS, because I'll have vendor lock-in, yet for dozens of years, they've been locked into proprietary databases to commercial enterprise platforms, these behemoth software things that AWS again has helped to democratize by providing these primitives and allowing people to build things backed on open-source. >> You're speaking our language, we talk about this all the time, the lock-in, there's always a lock-in spec somewhere, if it's good, the issue is proprietary software and switching costs. >> Yes. >> And choice, right? So that the dimensions to evaluate for customers that we've seen that's successful is, okay, I don't mind lock-in if it's a damn good solution, I'm going to lock that in. >> Right. >> But I have choice. This is going to be interesting, right? So the multi-cloud conversation that is going on around the DOD is interesting, we've been reporting and out in the field, we've been getting the data coming in, saying hey, this DOD kind of overture is interesting, because now if they take the same route as the CIA, we're talking about massive infiltration of Amazon Web Services across the government, because that CIA's kicking ass and taking names with Amazon. >> Mhmm. >> Now you've got the DOD looking down potentially a single-cloud option, other vendors are crying foul calling, we need spec in policy, which is a hijack model of putting in multi-cloud requirement. What's your thoughts on that? Should it be requirement or should we jump off? >> Well, for one, when you have innovators in a space and they take a lead in the space, you're going to get, that's a forcing function for other companies to compete, and that's not a bad thing, it really isn't. And a lot of these organizations, there might be reasons that are very valid reasons for them to consider multi-cloud, or even consider what they have within their own on-premise infrastructure. You've got, you know, tens and tens of years of legacy technical debt in your data center, there's not a reason to pull everything into the Cloud environment, there might be reasons to just let that die a slow death and sunset that. >> Got the mainframe. >> And, like the mainframe stuff, for them to look at even migrating mainframe capabilities into the Cloud, it's a lot of rewrite, it's a lot of things that need to happen. And maybe there's ways that you can extend that on-premise environment, breathe a little bit of life into the on-premise environment, while you're building out your new infrastructure. And that's probably the right path to take. >> And some people choose to have Cobalt code running banks right now, and just because they have that process. >> And it's working, and you know, they'll inevitably come to the time that they have to do that migration. >> Great commentary, great to have you on, great to chat about the technology trends. Smartronix, what are you guys doing, how do you guys fit into this trend, take a minute to talk about what you guys do, and your opportunity. >> Sure, Smartronix is about a 20-year-old company, we talk about some of our competitors will talk about being born in the Cloud, we were actually pretty much born in the enterprise, we helped the Marine Core establish their network operation security command, 20 some years ago, we were first to kind of lead virtualization technologies to help the forward-deployed forces move in and create kind of these tactical data centers, mobile data centers that can move into theater, so it's always kind of been on the forefront of network operations and cybersecurity, and innovative solutions, innovative use of technology, in government. >> The battle field's an instant case of how to deploy. >> Absolutely. >> You need wireless. >> Austere environments, you know, low-power, they used to bring trucks in to be able to set up their mobile data center, and we actually using virtualization technology back in 2004, you know. >> You got to push the envelope. >> You have to. >> Your job is to push the envelope. >> And that's really where I think Smartronix has done a really good job, is that we've helped these large organizations that are in very secure and highly-regulated compliance-driven environments, and utilize technology in innovative ways. More securely, and more optimally in these environments. So when we had a chance in 2009, to do a solution for President Obama at the time, they introduced the Recovery Act, they needed a website to track 750 billion dollars worth of funding. We came in with a pretty innovative solution. They said they had 10 weeks to build this, you're not going to do that in a data center environment. We came in with a solution that said on day one, we're going to utilize Amazon Web Services capabilities, we're going to build out the test endeavor while we build out the data center environment, and we're going to make your deadline by October 1st. And that was really the jumpstart of what we did. >> Do you meet your deadline? >> We absolutely did. >> What was that other website that you didn't actually get the deadline done, they had to bring in? >> Yeah, the healthcare. >> Oh, the Obama. >> So this one was recovery.gov, a very well-documented success, it ended up being the very first cloud-first initiative for the Federal Government. The very first government property running on public Cloud infrastructure, and then from there we migrated to >> Well, he doesn't get the credit he deserves on open government. >> He doesn't. >> He opened up data sets, he changed the game. >> He did, and again, that was, I think when you look at historically, when you look back at the CTOs and CIOs of the Federal Government at that time, they were really trying to look to see how commercial technologies could be applied in the government, how you could get that agility and innovation, and speed of business of commercial and do that in the Federal Government. And I think we embraced that at Smartronix pretty early on, and we were kind of on the leading edge sometimes of delivering this kind of abilities and services. >> Literally. So, you guys are the right group to call for IT to get modernized, because this is is problem. No one can hide anymore, there's no more excuses. And again, this is the lack of innovation. If you've been sitting around not innovating, now there's cyberwars attacking, you got cybersecurity, IT needs to transform, they got to do it like really fast. >> You got all of these competing pressures, security, you've got time, you've got cost, you've got capabilities, all of those things competing. You need to have a trusted advisor, a partner, to get you through that. What Smartronix has created, we call it our four pillars, and these are very simple pillars, but it's really really required for really looking at Cloud services strategy. You have to help the organization define what the business outcomes are that they want in these environments, help them think through what the roadmap and strategy is to get there, and then when you go to the second pillar, which is design, there's unique ways to design things to make it cloud-native, to utilize cloud-native services that also, when you get to the implementation and migration point, you're building these in a programmatic way that makes it easier to operate and manage, and that's the fourth pillar. So if you can get these organizations to think from strategy all the way through to run, all the way through to operations management, you're going to have the more effective organization and better services in your environment. >> Robert Groat, Executive Vice President of Technology at Smartronix, thanks for spending that time with me. >> Thanks, John. >> I'm John Furrier with the Cube, in Washington D.C., actually in Arlington, Virginia at Amazon Web Services Public Sector headquarters, thanks for watching. (bright music)