>> Announcer: Live from Washington D.C.
It's theCUBE!
Covering AWS Public Sector Summit.
Brought to you by Amazon Web Services.
>> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage
of AWS Public Sector here in beautiful Washington D.C.
Springtime in D.C., there's no better time to be here.
I'm your host, Rebecca Knight,
co-hosting along with John Furrier,
always so much fun to work with you.
>> Great to see you.
>> And this is a very exciting event for you in particular
'cause you've been doing a lot of great reporting
around the modernization of IT in government.
I'd love to have you just start riffing, John.
What's on your mind right now coming into this show?
What are some of the questions that're burning?
>> I mean clearly the most important story
that needs to be told
and is being talked about here in D.C. in the tech world is,
for this show specifically, is the JEDI contract,
the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative.
It's a word that's not being kicked around
at this show because--
>> Rebecca: Nothing to do with Star Wars.
>> It's literally the elephant in the room
because the contract's been waiting,
Oracle's been dragging it on
and Oracle's been part of apparently,
my opinion from my reporting,
is involved in some dirty under-handed tactics
against Amazon.
But it's being delayed because they're suing it.
And Oracle's out.
They have no chance of winning the deal,
it's really Microsoft and Amazon
are going to get a lion's share of the business.
So you have, that's the biggest story in tech
in D.C. in a long time,
is the role of cloud computing is playing
in reshaping how government, public sector operates.
Combine that with the fact that a new generation of workers
are coming in who have no dogma around IT technology,
how it's bought or consumed and purchased,
and the overcharging that's been going on
for many many years,
it's been called the Beltway Bandits for a reason
because of the waste and sometimes corruption.
So a new generation's upon us
and Amazon is the leader in making the change happen.
The deal they did with the CIA a few years ago
really was the catalyst.
And since then, public sector and the government
has realized that there's advantages to cloud,
not only for operating and serving society and its citizens
but also competitiveness on a global scale.
So a huge transformation, that's the story we're following.
That's the story that we got into
from the cloud side of the business here in D.C.
and that is just raging and expanding
and compounded by other factors like Facebook.
Irresponsibility in how they managed the data there.
Elections were tied in the balance.
You're seeing Brexit in the UK.
You're seeing counter-terrorism organizations
using the dark web and other cyber security challenges
at the United States.
Literally digital war is happening so a lot of people,
smart people, have recognized this
and it's now for the first time coming out.
>> Right, and I think the other thing
that we're also starting to talk much more about
is the regulation.
I know that you're friendly with Kara Swisher
and she bangs on about this all the time.
But then she said in a column the other day
the problem is is that they're now guns ablazing
but do they really understand it?
And also, is it too feeble, too little too late?
>> I mean, Kara Swisher nailed her story
in the New York Times and opinion piece.
And I've had similar opinions.
Look it.
She's been around for a long time,
I've been around for a long time.
I remember when Bill Clinton was president,
that's when the internet was upon us,
the Department of Commerce did a good job
with the domain name system,
they shepherded the technology
and they brought it out in a way that was responsible
and let government and industry
have a nice balancing act with each other
and the government really didn't meddle too much.
But there was responsibility back then
and it wasn't moving as fast.
So now you look at what's happening now,
the government can't just not ignore the fact
that YouTube is, in essence, its own state.
And it's acting irresponsibly
with how they're handling their situation.
You got Facebook run by a 30-something-year-old,
which essentially could be as large as a government.
So there's no ethics,
there's no thinking behind some of the consequences
that they've become.
So this begs the question, as a technology hock myself,
I love tech, never seen tech I didn't like.
I mean I love tech.
But there's a point where you got to get in there
and start shaping impact on ethics and society
and we're seeing real examples
of how this can wildfire out of control,
how tech has just become uncontrollable in a way.
>> Yes, no absolutely.
And so who is going to be the one to do that?
I know that on the show later
you're going to be talking to Jay Carney
who was obviously in the Obama administration,
now here at AWS.
It's a well-worn path from the public sector to technology.
Susan Molinari, a couple of other, David Plouffe.
That is the thing though,
that these people really need to get it.
Before they can lay down regulations and laws.
>> Again, back to why we're here
and stories we're trying to tell
and uncover and extract
is I think the big story that's emerging
from this whole world is not just the impact of cloud,
we talked about that, we're going to continue to cover that.
It's the societal impact and this real there there,
there's the intersection of public policy
and technology and science
where you don't have to be a programmer,
you can be an architect of change and know how it works.
Then being a coder and trying to codify a government
or society.
I think you're going to see a new kind of skillset emerge
where there's some real critical thinking
into how technology can be used for good.
You're seeing the trends, Hackathon For Good here,
you're seeing a lot of different events
where you have inclusion and diversity,
bringing more perspectives in.
So you got the perfect storm right now for a sea change
where it won't be led by the nerds, so to speak,
but geeky digital generations will change it.
I think that's going to be a big story.
Not just workforce changeover but real disciplines
around using machine-learning for ethics, societal impact.
These are the storylines.
I think this is going to be a big long 10-year,
20-year changeover.
>> But what will it take though?
For the best and the brightest of the nerds
to want to go into public service
rather than go work for the tech behemoths
that are making these changes?
I mean that's the thing, it's a war for talent
and as we know and we've discussed a lot on theCUBE,
there's a big skills gap.
>> I think it's been talked about a lot on the web,
the millennials want to work for a company
that's mission-based.
What more mission-based can you look for
than so unto our public service right now?
John F. Kennedy's famous line,
"Ask not what your country can do for you,
"what you can do for you country."
That might have that appeal for the younger generation
because we need it!
So the evidence is there
and you look at what's going on with our government.
There's so many inefficiencies from healthcare
to tax reform to policies.
There's a huge opportunity to take that waste,
and this is what cloud computing
and AI and machine-learning can do,
is create new capabilities
and address those critical waste areas
and again, healthcare is just one of many many many others
in government where you can really reduce
that slack with tech.
So it's a great opportunity.
>> And where would you say,
and I know you've been reporting on this for a long time,
where is the government in terms of all of this?
I remember not very long ago
when healthcare.gov was rolled out
and it was revealed that many agencies
were still using floppy disks.
The government is, first of all
is not this monolithic thing, it's many different agencies
all with their own tech agendas
and with their own processes and policies.
So where do you place the government
in terms of its modernization right now?
>> On the elected officials side, it's weak.
They're really not that smart when it comes to tech.
Most of the people that are involved
in the elected side of the Hill
are either lawyers or some sort of major
that's not technical.
So you can see that with Sundar Pichai from Google
and Mark Zuckerberg's testimony
when the basic kind of questions they're asking,
it's almost a joke.
So I think one, the elected officials
have to become more tech-savvy.
You can't regulate and govern what you don't understand.
I think that something that's pretty obvious
to most digital natives.
And then on the kind of working class,
the Defense Department and these other agencies,
there's real people in there that have a passion for change
and I think there's change agents,
Amazon's done really well there.
I think that is a piece where you're going to see a movement,
where you're going to see this digital native movement
where people going to be like,
"There's no excuse not to do this right."
And I think there's new ways to do it,
I think that's going to change.
So that's that.
On the business side,
to how the government procures technology
is literally like the '80s,
it's like that movie "Hot Tub Time Machine"
where you get thrown back.
Everything is based on 1980s procurement, 1990s procurement.
I mean, shipping manuals.
So all these things have to change.
How do you procure cloud?
If you got to go through a six-month procurement process
just to spit up some servers, that's not agility.
So procurement's got to change.
Competitiveness, what does that mean?
This Oracle deal with JEDI
highlights a lot of flaws in the government.
Which is Oracle's using these rules around procurement
to try to stall Amazon, it's kind of like a technicality
but it's so irrelevant to the reality of the situation.
So procurement has to change.
>> Well one of the things you said
about how there's a lot of pressure to get it right.
And that is absolutely true
because we are dealing with national security issues,
people's lives, health, these really important topics.
And yet the private sector
doesn't always get it right the first time either.
So how would you describe the government,
the federal approach to how they start to implement
these new technologies and experiment
with other kinds of tools and techniques?
>> Well I think there's obviously some agencies
that have sensitive things.
CIA's a poster child in my opinion of how to do it right.
The JEDI, Department of Defense is emulating that
and that's a good thing.
The Department of Defense is also going multicloud
as they put out in their statement.
Amazon for the JEDI piece which is for troops in the field.
I think that every agency's going to have its own workload
and those workloads should decide which cloud to use
based upon the architecture of the workload.
'Cause the data needs to be in the cloud,
it needs to be real time.
And to take the military example,
you can't have lag in military,
it's not a video game, it's real life, people die.
Lag can literally kill people in the field.
So technology can be a betterment there
but technology to avoid fighting is another one.
So you have all these things going on,
I think the government's got to really design everything
around the workload, their mission, their applications,
rather than designing around
here's your infrastructure, then decide.
>> One of the things we talk about all the time,
almost ad nauseam, on theCUBE is digital transformation.
And so how do you think about those two,
private sector versus public sector?
What are the big differences
in terms of these institutions on their own journeys
of digital transformation?
>> I think the government's slower.
That's an easy one to talk about.
I think there's a lot of moving parts involved,
you mentioned some of the procurement things,
so a lot of processes.
It's the same kind of equation.
People process technology,
except the people that process
is much more complicated on the public sector side
than private sector, unless it's a big company.
So imagine the biggest company in the private sector side,
multiply that times a hundred, that's the government.
So in each agency there's a lot of things going on there.
But it's getting better.
I think cloud has shown that you can actually do that,
the people side of thing's going to be addressed
by this new migration of new generation
of people coming in saying,
"I don't really care how you did it before,
"this is how we're going to do it today."
The processes are going to be optimized
so there's some innovation around process improvement
that's going to end on the wayside
and the technology everyday is coming faster and faster.
Recognition, facial recognition software.
Look at that.
AI.
These are things that are just undeniable now,
they have to be dealt with.
What do you do to privacy?
So again, back to process.
So people process technology.
>> AWS is a behemoth in cloud computing.
What do you want to be hearing here at this conference?
They're so far ahead of Google and Microsoft
but we cannot count those two companies out,
of course not.
But what are you looking for for key messaging at this show?
>> Well I'm looking forward to seeing Andy Jassy's
Fireside Chat with Teresa Carlson tomorrow.
I'm interested in some of the use cases
coming out of Teresa Carlson's top customers
in public sector, again it's global public sector
so it's not just in North America here in the United States.
I'm interested in also understanding
what's real and what's not real
around the fear, uncertainty and doubt
that a lot of people have been putting on Amazon.
Because I see Amazon posturing in a way
that's saying go faster, make change and it's not so much
that they want to monopolize the entire thing,
they're just moving faster.
And I think Andy Jassy yesterday
saying that they welcome regulation
is something that they're trying to push the regulators on.
So I think they welcome change.
So I want to understand if Amazon really wants to go faster
or is there an agenda there. (laughs)
What's going on?
>> I know, methinks these tech titans
are asking for a little too much regulation right now.
I mean obviously Mark Zuckerberg has also said,
"Please regulate us, I can't do this alone."
And here we have Andy Jassy yesterday
saying those same things.
>> Andy Jassy said on stage yesterday with Kara Swisher,
"We can't arrest people."
So if their tech goes bad,
they're only beholden to the consequences
as a private entity.
They're not the law so this is where again,
back to top story here is that,
what is the role of government?
This change is here.
It's not going away, it's only going to get faster.
So the sooner the elected officials
and all the agencies get out in front
of the digital transformation, the sooner the better.
Otherwise it's going to be a wrecking ball.
>> Well I cannot wait to dig into more of this
over the next two days with you, here at AWS Public Sector.
>> All right.
>> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier,
you are watching theCUBE.
(upbeat music)