 From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hello, and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich. Today we'll discuss the award for the most customer-obsessed mission-based win for state and local government. I'm pleased to introduce our guests for today's session, Todd Carey, Global Head AWS Business Group, Cognizant, and David Sullivan, Chief Executive Officer of Elizabeth River Crossings. Thank you gentlemen for joining the program. Thanks, Natalie. Thanks. Perfect. Well, Todd, I'd love to start with you. How are companies thinking about Cloud today in their businesses? Well, there's some really exciting developments, but at the heart of it, Cloud is changing the way companies interact with their customers, their suppliers, and the way they think about business. And at Cognizant, it is really a customer-first, customer-centric approach. And then we work our way back to a solution. But most of the time, Cloud decisions are not really made from a cost optimization or cost takeout point of view. They're made from a customer experience or a business driver point of view. And how do we make businesses better, more scalable, more agile, more flexible? And we've really built some really great solutions that are industry-specific. And we've loved working with ERC in this capacity. How about you? I'd love to get your insight as well, David. What do you see as the main challenges and also how next-gen technologies like 5G can help alleviate in those issues? Yes, Natalie. First, like Todd said, the customer has an expectation. And that expectation is raised every day by what they experience in every other channel they work in and shop in and whatever they're doing. So expectations are always increasing from the customer side. Responsiveness, personalization, they want to see all of that in everything they do, including paying their toll bill. And so I think as technology has changed, tolling has kind of come from technology that is really 20, 30 years old or older to more of a modern influence. And today we use RFID tags that are embedded in things like EasyPass. But in the future, it'll be your mobile device or your automobile itself that triggers a toll transaction and helps us process it and make it in a way that is fast, convenient, and most importantly, accurate. Yeah, well, saying with you, David, I'd love to hear how working with AWS helped modernize your systems. And as well as if you could give us some insight on your tracking systems. Yes, so with AWS, we have been working with Cognizant. Cognizant is our tolling subcontractor. So they're responsible for providing our tolling system. And we had what I would call a typical legacy tolling system. We had two data centers, both of them located pretty close together, a primary and a redundant data center and both of them very close to flood prone areas. And in our location in the Southeast corner of Virginia, we're very vulnerable to tropical storms and tidal flooding. So part of our concern was, we're exposed. All our infrastructure, all our tolling infrastructure is exposed. So as we began to pursue a cloud strategy, the first idea was just to lift everything out of our environment and move it to AWS. And Cognizant pulled that off in about three months, which is really pretty incredible. And we never missed a beat. You know, we did it over a three-day holiday weekend, but from a business transaction standpoint, it all flowed. Once in the cloud, we began to rethink now that we're out of these legacy hardware environments, how do we get out of the legacy application environment and embrace what the cloud enables and working closely with Cognizant who had a great vision for how this could be achieved, we were able to systematically move through and migrate to a cloud-first, cloud-oriented system. And it's given us lower cost, increased availability. And most importantly, for our customer service agents that deal with customers or customers that deal with the web, it's given them a better experience. Shorter call times, better information and frankly, better customer satisfaction. Terrific. Well, thank you for that. Todd, let's shift to you. What do you see as the next phase of this digital transformation process? Well, as David hit on, I think it's an important theme of cloud-first. I mean, most companies and our clients start with that cloud-first, cloud-native mentality, but for Cognizant, our cloud approach is really customer-first and being able to start with the client in mind and then work our way back into a technology stack or into a scalable solution. But specifically for the toll industry, there's a lot of things that are needed around revenue predictability and looking at potential leakages. But as we hit on already, making sure that we're really delivering a great customer experience. And so with our solution, as we expect our tolling solution to really grow, we're keeping it cloud-native, we're keeping it modular in nature and integration ready. So if, for example, our toll customers can use their own roadside solutions or handpick some of the small back-office modules that they want to use, it's always going to be purpose-built and aligned to our customer. And we see nothing but growth in this segment. It's very exciting. Yeah, terrific. Well, David, now that you've actually implemented this, what do you see as the next phase? What is your vision for the future for your business in 2021? Well, I think for us moving forward, we've been in this, as Todd said, kind of a modular approach, which is great because you can make the changes and really manage your risk while you're making them. So you're moving small things, whereas traditionally, new systems meant massive investments, long-time implementation times, and all-end cutovers, all of which are packed with risk. So we want to reduce our risk and the solution that we have being cloud-native allows us to really incrementally and quickly just continually to improve the system. So on our forecast, we would like to have a better insight into our customers and support a direct app, an ERC app that would allow our customers to interact with us and give us a better view of the customer and a better experience for the customer overall. But our goal is to build that total transaction accurately, fairly, and then if the customer has an issue to be able to treat them in a way that they feel respected and valued as a customer, because we do look at it that way. Yeah, terrific. Obviously, engagement is such an important issue in this area. Now, I'd like to shift gears and hear a little bit more about, what are some of the other applications that Cognizant could provide beyond tolling? And let's shift this to Todd. Well, David, you know, a little bit. There's a lot of, when we start to focus on the customer, there's a lot of opportunity there on the front side. So, mobile apps, websites, synchronization of data, but then also the way that we support that customer interacting with that data, things like IVR or automating call centers, being able to support that customer through the entire chain of custody. There's some new and exciting applications now that would come out, and David touched on a little bit too, in terms of vehicles. So, the vehicles to everything type motion, that's an exciting development in this segment as well. To be able to continually integrate everything that's in the customer ecosystem. So, whether that's the need to pay a bill, or be able to drive a car through a gate and be able to simply not touch anything, but be able to have that payment processed all the way through, and then have clear visibility into usage and insights, and then also be able to turn all that data over to a company like ERC to make good decisions based on what they see in terms of buying patterns, consumption, et cetera. There's a lot of expansion going on in this, and the greatest part about this is it's built on the AWS platform. So, when we architect something in a cloud native way, we can rapidly expand it, and we can really streamline the investment required to jumpstart any kind of innovation. And best of all, our customers in keeping with the AWS model, really only pay for the actual traffic that they use, so we can keep those long-term costs down. Yeah, well, excellent point. Thank you both gentlemen for joining our program. Really loved having you, and that was Todd Carey and David Sullivan, excuse me, and I'm your host, Natalie Orlick. Thank you for watching.