>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE,
covering AWS re:Invent 2019
brought to you by Amazon Web services and Intel
along with it's ecosystem partners.
>> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE,
here live in Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent.
I'm John Furrier with Dave Velante.
As always, extracting the signal from the noise.
We're here for our seventh re:Invent
of the eight years that they've had it.
What a wave.
One of the biggest waves is the modernization
of procurement, the modernization of business,
commercial business and the rapid acceleration
of public sector.
We're here with the Chief of Public Sector for AWS,
Teresa Carlson, Vice President of Public Sector Globally.
Great to have you, great to see you.
>> Thank you for having me.
It's so great to have theCUBE again this year.
We appreciate you guys being here.
>> So, we're just seeing so much acceleration
of modernization, even in the commercial side.
Andy talks about transformation.
It's just as hard core on the public sector side.
You have so many different areas transforming faster
because they haven't transformed before.
>> Teresa: That's correct.
>> This is a lot of change.
What's changed the most for you and your business?
>> Well, again, I'll be here ten years this month at AWS,
and my eighth re:Invent, and what really changed
which was very exciting this year is on Monday
we had 550 international government executives here
from 40 countries who were talking
about their modernization efforts at every level.
Now, again, think about that,
40 different governments, 550 executives.
We had a fantastic day for them planned
and it was really phenomenal because the way that these
international governments are thinking about their budget
is how much are they going to use of it for maintaining.
And they want to get that less and less.
A bucket for modernization, but then, John,
it's a bucket for innovation so that they continue
not to only modernize but they are really looking
at innovation cycles.
So, that's a big one.
And then you heard from some of our customers
at the breakfast this morning from ATF
as part of Department of Justice, what they're doing,
the Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms.
They've completely moved to the cloud.
They've gotten rid of 20 years of technical debt,
to the Veteran's Administration on what they're doing,
or VA benefits, to educational institutions like RMIT.
>> Yeah, I know Andy had on stage, it was the keynote Cerner
which is a healthcare company and what struck me
about then and I think it relates to your business
and I want to get your reaction is that the healthcare
is such an acute example that everyone can relate to.
Rise in costs, so cloud helping reduce cost
increase the efficiencies in patient care.
It's a triple win.
The same thing happens in public sector.
There's no place to hide anymore.
You have bonafide efficiencies that could come
right out of the gate with cloud, plus innovation.
And it's happening in all the sectors
within the public sector.
>> It's so true, well, Cerner is a great example
because they won the award at VA, at Veterans Administration
to do the whole entire medical records modernization.
So, you have a company on stage that's as commercial,
as much commercial as they are public sector,
that are going into these large modernization efforts
and as you said, John, these are not easy.
This takes focus and leadership and a real culture change
to make these things happen.
>> The international expansion is impressive.
We saw each other in London.
We did the healthcare drill down at your offices,
of course national health.
And then you guys were in Bahrain.
And what I discerned is it's not like these organizations
are way behind, I mean, especially the ones
that have moved to the cloud.
They're moving really fast, so
>> They don't have as much technical debt internationally
as what we see here in the US.
So, I was just in Africa and you know what we talked about?
Digitizing paper.
Well, there's no technology on that end
so there it's exciting because they can literally start
from square one and get going.
And there's a real hunger and a need to make it happen.
So, it's different for every country
in terms of where they are in their cloud journey.
>> So, I want to get, I want to ask you about some
of the big deals.
Obviously, JEDI is in the news and I know you can't talk
about it because it's in protests and lit and legal issues
but you have a lot of big deals that you've done.
Could you share some color commentary on some of
the big deals and what it really means?
>> Yeah, well, first of all let me just say
with Department of Defense, JEDI or no JEDI
we have a very significant business doing work
at every part of Department of Defense.
The Army, Navy, Air Force, in the intelligence community
who has a mission for DoD from NSA to NGA to NRO.
And we are not slowing down in DoD.
We had 250 people at a breakfast, or a luncheon yesterday
giving ideas on what they're doing and sharing
best practices around defense.
So, we're not slowing down at DoD.
We're really excited.
We have amazing partners that are doing mission work with us
but in terms of some really fun things that have happened
we did a press announcement today with FINRA,
the financial regulatory authority here in the US
that regulates markets.
This is the largest financial set of transactions
you'll ever see being processed and run on the cloud.
And the program is called CAT,
Consolidated Audit Trail, and if you remember
the flash crash and the markets going crazy from 2008
when it started, FINRA started on a journey
to try to understand why these market events were happening.
And now they have won something called CAT
which will do more than a hundred billion market points
a day that will be processed on the cloud
and this is what we know of right now.
And they'll be looking for indicators of nefarious behavior
within the markets and will look for indicators
on a continuous basis.
Now, what we've talked about it we don't even know
what we don't know yet because we're getting so much data
we're going to start processing and crunching
coming out of all kinds of groups that they're working with.
But this is an important point even for FINRA.
They're going to be retiring technical debt that they have.
So, as they roll out CAT they'll be retiring other systems
like OATS and other programs that they run.
>> Well, I was going to say, so the flash crash,
this is really important, the consolidated audit trails,
is because the flash crash, they'll chalk it up
to a glitch in the system.
Translation, "We don't really know what happened."
So, to have a consolidated audit trail and having
the data and the capabilities to understand it
is really, really important for transparency and confidence
in the markets.
>> It's huge, and by the way, FINRA has been working
with us since 2014.
They're one of our best partners and our prolific users
of the cloud and I will tell you, it's important that
we have industries like FINRA regulatory authorities
that are going in and saying, "Look, we couldn't possibly
"do what we're doing without cloud computing."
>> Teresa, tell me about the technical debt
because I like this conversation because we talk about
on the commercial side in a developer kind of thinking,
most businesses, startups, whatever.
What does technical debt mean in public sector?
Can you be specific?
>> Well, it's years and years of legacy applications
that never had any modernization associated with them.
In public sector, you know that because you've talked
about these procurements.
You're very, both of you are very savvy now
in public sector.
>> We know how bad it is, it's horrible.
It's like 1995.
>> Teresa: It's not for the faint of hearts though,
for sure.
When you do a procurement, over the years
when they would do something they wouldn't build in
new innovations or modernizations.
So, if you think about, if you build a data center today,
a traditional data center, it's outdated tomorrow.
The same thing with the procurement.
By the time that they delivered on those requirements
they were outdated.
So, technical debt then has been built up
years upon years of not modernizing and just maintaining
a status quo with no new insights or analytics
that you couldn't add any new tooling.
So, that is where you see agencies like ATF that have said,
"Wow, if I'm going to have a modern agency
"that tracks things like forensics, understands
"the machine learning of what's happening in justice
"and public safety I need to have the most modern tools
"and I can't do that on an outdated system."
So, that's what we call technical debt that just maintains
that system without having anything new
that you're adding to it.
>> Yeah, and the capabilities lag and everything's
>> Yes, exactly.
>> The products bad.
Okay great, thanks for that definition.
I got to ask you about something that's near and dear
to our heart, collaboration.
If you look at the big successes in the world
and within Amazon, quantum, Cal Tech's partnering
on the quantum side.
You've done a lot of collaboration with Cal Poly
for ground station, Amazon educate.
You've been very collaborative in your business
and that's continuing to be a best practice.
You have now new things like the cloud innovation centers.
Talk about that dynamic and how collaboration
has become an important part of your business model.
>> Well, we use our own principles from Amazon
when we go out and build new things.
And our cloud innovation centers, we started out
piloting those to see could they work
and it's really a public private partnership
between AWS and universities.
But it's universities that really want to do something.
And Cal Poly is a great example,
Arizona State University a great example,
the number one most innovative university in the US
for four years in a row.
And what we do is we go in and we do these public sector
challenges so the collaboration happens, John,
between the public sector entity, the university
with students and us.
And what we bring to the table is technical talent,
our technology and our mechanisms and processes
like our working backwards processes.
And they, and we're like, "We want you to bring
"your best and brightest students.
"Let's bring public sector in the fold."
They bring challenges that are real that we can take on
and then they can go back and absorb.
And they're pretty exciting.
Today I talked about we have over 44 today
that we've documented and we're working at Cal Poly.
The one at Arizona State University is about smart cities.
And then you heard we're announcing new ones.
We've got two in France, one in Germany,
now one that we're doing on cybersecurity
with RMIT in Australia, two we said in Bahrain.
So, you're going to see us add a lot more of these
and we are getting the results out of them.
So, we won't do them if we don't like them,
but right now we really like these partnerships.
>> The results are looking good.
What's going on with them?
>> The results are great and I'll tell you why,
why they're different.
We are taking on real public sector issues and challenges
that are happening.
They're not pie in the sky.
We might get there because those are good things to do,
but what we want to do is let's tackle things that are real.
Homelessness, opioid crisis, human sex trafficking
that we're seeing, things that are real
in these communities and those are grand,
but then we're taking on areas like farming
where we talked about can we get strawberries
that are rotting on the vine out of the field
into the market before you lose billions of dollars
in California.
So, it's things like that that we're, so it's challenges
that are quick and real.
And the thing about cloud is you can create an application
and solution and test it out very rapidly
without high cost of doing that, and no technical debt.
>> You mentioned smart cities, I just attended a session.
Marty Walsh, the mayor of Boston, has got this 50 year
smart city plan and it's pretty impressive
but it's a heavy lift.
So, what do you see going on in smart cities?
I mean, you really can't do it without the cloud
which was my big input.
Where's the cloud, where's the data?
What are you seeing?
>> Well, cloud IoT is a big part of all these sensors
that Andy talked about yesterday in his keynote
and why the 5G partnerships are so important.
These sensors are going to be everywhere
and you don't even know they really exist
because they can be everywhere.
And if you have the 5G capabilities to move
those communications really fast and encrypt them
so you have all the security you need,
this is game changing, but I'll give you an example.
I'll go back to the kit for a minute
at Arizona State University.
They put IoT sensors everywhere.
They know traffic patterns, how many parking slots
are filled, what utilities of water,
if their trash bins are being filled up,
the number of seats that are being taken up in stadiums.
So, it's things like that that they're really working
to understand what are the dynamics of their city
and traffic flow around that smart city.
And then they're adding things on for the students
like Alexa skills.
Where's all the activity?
So, you're adding all things like Alexa apps
which go into a smart city kind of dynamic.
Where do I shop?
Where's the best activities?
Where do I buy my books?
Where do I buy my clothes?
What's the pizza on sale tonight?
So, and then to things like you saw today on Singapore
where they're taking data from all different
elements of agencies and presenting that back
to a citizen from their child as an example
day one of a birth, even before.
Where's all the services?
What do I do, how do I track these things?
How do I navigate my city to get to all those services?
These seem like pie in the sky things.
They're not, they're real and they're actually happening.
>> Well, it seems like they're instrumenting
a lot of the components of the city,
learning from that and then deciding, okay,
where do we double down and where do we place our bets?
>> And it's making them a resilient government,
a resilient town.
I mean, these are the things that citizens can really
help take control of and have a voice in doing.
>> Teresa, I want to say congratulations to your success.
I know it's not for the faint of hearts
in the public sector these days.
A lot of blockers, a lot of politics,
a lot of government blockers and old procurement systems,
technical debt.
I mean, Windows 95 is probably still on a bunch of PCs.
>> Totally.
>> And on F-50, 45 fighters, 15 fighters,
so you've got a great job.
You've been doing a great job in riding that wave,
so congratulations.
>> Well, I'll just say it's worth it, it is worth it.
We are committed to public sector and we really want to see
everyone from our war fighters to our citizens
have the capabilities they need, so thank you, John.
>> And you know that we're very passionate this year
about going into 2020 for theCUBE and our audience
to do a lot more check for good programming.
This is something that's near and dear
to your heart as well.
You have a chance to shape technology.
>> Yes, well, today you saw we had a really amazing
not for profit on stage with us called GameChanger.
And what we found with not for profits is that technology
can be a game changer if they use it because it makes
their mission dollars go much further.
And they're an amazing father and son team
that started GameChanger.
Taylor was in the hospital five years with terminal cancer
and he and his father through these five years
looked around and said, "Look at all these children.
"What do they need?"
And they started, he is actually still here with us today
and now he's a young adult taking care of other
young children with cancer using gaming technologies
with our partner Twitch and AWS and helping analyze
and understand what these young affected children
with cancer need, both personally and academically.
And the tools he has, he's helping really promote this
and give back and it's really heart warming,
so I was happy.
My partner, Mike Clayville, who runs commercial
sales and business and I run public sector,
today were honored to give them a small token
of a gift from AWS to help support their efforts.
>> Well, congratulations, we appreciate you coming on
theCUBE sharing the updates.
And good luck in 2020.
Great to see you, ten years at AWS.
>> I know.
>> John: It's day one still?
>> It's day one, I feel like I just started.
>> Is it still ten o'clock in the morning
or is it still 8:00 a.m.?
Is it afternoon?
>> It's like 8:00 a.m.
I still wake up every day with a jump in my step
and excited about what I'm going to do.
And so I am really excited about what we're doing.
And like Andy and I said, we're just scratching the surface.
>> You're a fighter, you are charging.
We love you, you're a great executive.
>> Thank you.
>> You're the chief of public sector.
You've done a great job, great to follow you
and ride the wave with Amazon and cover you guys.
We're documenting history.
>> Yeah, exactly, and happy holidays to you all
and hope to see you at our summits in 2020, thank you.
>> Thank you so much, okay, theCube coverage here live
in Las Vegas.
This is theCUBE coverage.
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