- Hi, I'm Anna Green, Head of Small and Medium Business
here at AWS across Asia, Pacific, and Japan.
I'm really excited to welcome Jason Grant,
the Head of IT at Rubicon Water to speak to us today
at our Business Builders Series here at AWS.
Jason, welcome.
I am so pleased to be talking to you today about water,
our world's most precious resource.
Can you tell us a bit about Rubicon's purpose and vision,
and really kind of frame the conversation for us
in terms of what it is you're trying to build?
- Yes, I can, Anna,
So, thank you.
And we're certainly in the sustainability business
so you've come to the right place.
So to give you three sobering statistics
just to frame everybody's challenge,
the OECD predicted that by the year 2050,
around 40% of the world's population
are gonna be experiencing severe water scarcity,
two thirds of the fresh water used on the planet
goes to agricultural purposes
with possibly 50% or more that being lost
due to clumsy delivery,
and then NASA reporting big problems
with our underground aquifers as well.
Now, all of this requires intervention to get better,
and that's where Rubicon comes in.
So Rubicon offer devices that regulate flow
down big canal systems and onto farms and within farms.
We have the software to orchestrate that delivery
and we have radio systems that allow the communications.
What we've done so far is shipped around 35,000 devices
around the planet, 17 countries and counting,
now shipping solutions in India as well,
and farmers are now seeing water
for the first time in 30 years.
So we can make a big difference here
to sustainability of food on the planet.
- That is such a cool story about the use of technology
in helping to create sustainable outcomes.
I'm really interested to hear more from you
about what the role of software is
in improving water productivity.
- Okay, well, I'll open by giving you two stories
that illustrate the benefits that software is making.
So one customer we have in the USA, for example,
were losing quite a lot of water on a regular basis.
So if you think about an Olympic swimming pool,
and maybe stack seven of those,
seven and a half of those up to make a big skyscraper
out of water, maybe a question for you, Anna
is how frequently do you think they were losing
that amount of water?
- Well, I used to use the swimming pool,
the local pool as a child, maybe every three months.
- Well, would you believe they were losing it every day?
And then there are other irrigational authorities like them
around the planet who are doing the same thing,
so that's kind of bad, right?
Then we've got a customer in Australia
who's recently announced
that they're giving back 300 million worth of water
or potentially just banking it for drought planning.
So you can see
that there's a big commercial proposition there,
and also there's the environmental benefit as well.
We think that we're making a huge difference
in the area of sustainability.
- Totally sounds like you are.
And look for us here at AWS.
We really focus on trying to offload
the undifferentiated heavy lifting for our customers
so they can get on with a business
of actually doing business.
Can you tell us about
how your team are looking at using technology
so that they can focus on the sustainable outcome
versus, you know the infrastructure stack?
- Yeah, totally.
And that's super important to me as a development lead.
We've got customers who are naturally rural,
don't have the capacity to maintain on-prem solutions,
so they're increasingly asking us to host our solutions
in AWS.
And then we've got SAS solutions too,
with a great economy of scale proposition.
As the dev lead, I can now do my continuous delivery,
and allows me to concentrate on my features and my product,
rather than maintaining all of these different customers.
Now, how does that help with sustainability?
Well, firstly, the proximity is important,
allows me to go to all corners of the planet,
and we've got regulatory constraints sometimes
so we have to have the data within national boundaries.
AWS helps me to do that.
Also that economy of scale that I was talking about
allows me to push into economies
where the costs might have otherwise been a barrier.
- I love that.
It's so great to hear that our technology is helping you
to scale, I guess, fundamentally
and think about different markets.
So can you tell us more
about what's next for Rubicon in the future?
- We wanna partner with those entities
who care about water delivery,
so we want to get water to the right place efficiently
and make every last drop get to the right place
in terms of crop vitality.
The other thing we want to do
is hit the bottom of the pyramid
and make sure we get out to diverse locations,
arid locations, make sure that we hit emerging economies,
and if we do that,
we could potentially benefit millions around the world.
- Thank you so much, Jason.
That is such an amazing story of using technology
to really deliver great outcomes for communities
across the world.
So I just wanna say thank you so much on behalf of AWS
for joining me for this conversation today.
- And thank you, Anna and AWS.
It's been a pleasure.