(upbeat music)
>> Hello, everyone.
This is a special presentation of theCUBE.
We're here in London at AWS,
one of AWS' locations in London.
My name is Dave Vellante.
In theCUBE, we like to go out to the events,
we extract the signal from the noise,
and we've been following the ascendancy
of AWS public sector from its early days.
If you go back to 2013,
there was a significant moment in the history of AWS
where it won a CIA contract, a very large contract of CIA.
It was contested by IBM.
IBM was used to what's sometimes called the old guard,
the legacy companies,
used to selling into the government big, big contracts.
And here comes this startup essentially,
AWS taking away government business, the CIA no less.
Huge, huge contract.
Well, IBM contested it.
Judge Wheeler ruled against IBM for AWS.
When reading that ruling, it was clear
that the AWS platform was superior to the IBM platform.
He laid out essentially the components of the RFP
line by line and showed that AWS was the winner
in virtually all of the line items.
I think there was parity in one.
The reason why that was so important,
there were several factors there.
One, it was a major milestone event,
not only for AWS but for cloud in general.
If you think about security,
CIA, obviously very security conscious,
it was the recognition
that cloud actually could be more secure
than on-premises infrastructure.
So, the government was actually one of the first
to realize that and lean into that.
As a side effect, IBM had to go out and spend
$2 billion on soft layer to actually compete
in the cloud marketplace.
So, you had all these ripple effects.
Fast forward today to 2019, you have the JEDI contract,
The Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative.
It's a $10 billion contract.
AWS is in the lead for that contract.
Oracle, again another old guard company, has contested.
And when you look through,
when a company contests these bids,
a whole lot of public information comes out.
What the information suggested was, that a single cloud,
the DoD determined that a single cloud was more secure,
less complex, and more cost-effective.
And so, Oracle contested the likelihood of an award
to a single company because government contracts
usually are awarded to multiple vendors.
But, in this case, because it's so critical
to have the data in one place
so that they can serve the field better
and respond to the field better,
the DoD decided to use a single cloud.
So, Oracle is throwing all kinds of muck into the ring,
basically asking the General Accountability Office
to look at it, they did, the GAO said
we're gonna go with the DoD's decision.
The DoD itself did an internal investigation.
Now it's narrowed down to two vendors, AWS and Microsoft.
And we believe that AWS is the leading contender.
Why is that?
It's because AWS has the most services,
it's the most advanced,
the highest levels of security and certifications.
within the government that are necessary
to win these types of contracts.
Why do I spend so much time on these things?
These are two milestone events, the CIA contract in 2013
and what will soon to be the JEDI contract in 2019.
And what we're seeing is, Amazon Web Services,
a $30 billion runway company,
growing at 40-plus percent per annum.
It's just a massive flywheel effect
that we always talk about on theCUBE.
So, we're here in London
because we wanted to see how the public sector activities
of Amazon translating into the European markets.
So, we're here at a special public sector mini summit,
if you will.
There is a healthcare pre-day going on.
This is ahead of the AWS London Summit.
And we're siphoning off a number of the practitioners
in startups, software companies, AWS partners
in the healthcare industry, as well as AWS executives
particularly focused on the public sector today.
So, we're doing this, we've followed the career
of Teresa Carlson for a number of years,
seen the ascendancy of AWS public sector,
we covered a public sector summit in DC.
We flew to Bahrain.
Last year, John Furrier, my business partner,
did the Bahrain.
Summit Bahrain was the first country in the Middle East
to declare cloud-first,
a critical location in the Middle East.
And you're seeing it now, Europe,
across a number of industries, obviously NHS,
the National Health Service is very prominent in the UK,
and a big consumer of services, all kinds of startups
and other software companies trying to sell
and help transform the NHS.
NHS has
put forth $1/2 billion,
nearly $1/2 billion pound initiative on modernization.
A lot of that modernization is involving the cloud.
So, theCUBE is here.
We're trying to peel back the onion,
understand what's going on here,
who are the winners, who's gonna get affected,
practitioners, startups, CEOs, nonprofit organizations,
NGOs, executives from AWS and across the industry.
So, we'll be here.
We have three events this week in London,
here today at AWS headquarters in London.
Tonight we have an impact investor event,
and then tomorrow we're at the AWS Summit in London,
at the ExCeL Center.
So, keep it right here, watch this channel,
check out siliconangle.com for all the news,
check out thecube.net,
which is where we host all these videos,
and, of course, wikibon.org for all the research.
So, thank you for watching, and keep it right there,
and you're watching theCUBE.
This is Dave Vellante.