 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 the AWS Public Sector Summit here in our nation's capital. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We have Allison Robinson joining us. She is the AVP IT operations at Cal Poly University. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you for having me. So talk about your big announcement yesterday in terms of ground station. This is one of John's favorite topics, so tell us more about what you announced. So yesterday there was an announcement that Cal Poly, through our digital transformation hub, and that hub exists to do innovative things with the greater good through the public sector and helping with challenges that they're trying to learn more about and solve problems. And so through that group, we announced the initiative to do CUBE satellite in connection with ground station at AWS to be able to help people that use these satellites, be able to test their satellites and collect data and share it ultimately with others. Because there's a problem. They're not expensive satellites, but that means you don't have a lot of money to work with. And so to be able to test and make sure your communications are good and the infrastructure's there is kind of missing in the whole environment and now that's going to be solved. And you're able to get many more shots and also pay as you go, not necessarily have to, as you said, put up your own satellite yourself. You can put the satellite up, the problem was the infrastructure to communicate back with it. So the ground station, those antennae are approximately located to AWS regions. So you can now bring the data, process it, store it, analyze it, and then ultimately share it. That, again, being for the public good, we want to make sure that the data we're collecting is in the AWS data set registry so that people can access that information. That's important. Allison, talk about the relationship with AWS. How did it get started? I mean, you're involved in these cool projects like ground station, which I'm a big fan of because I think the impact to IoT, just forest fires in California could be a real saver right there. Just using data, backhauling data for whatever is going to be a great thing. But you've got a relationship with AWS that goes beyond not just ground stations, other things going on. Take a minute to explain the relationship with AWS. So the vice president of IT at Cal Poly, Bill Britton, began his position with Cal Poly about two years ago and took a look at the data center and had to ask the question, do we invest here on-prem or do we have to look for something else? And that began the conversation of we need to do something about a data center. It looks like Amazon has the tools we need to modernize our technical environment, both in how we work, how people work our processes and our technical infrastructure. And so that began the work of, we announced two years ago, I didn't work for Cal Poly yet. They announced there, the president and Bill announced that we were all in where data center was going to AWS. I happened to be presenting on a different topic and we connected there. And a year later, we made a connection and I've been at Cal Poly now for a year to help them get to the AWS data center. A lot of smart people at Cal Poly, I know I looked at the university, great computer science, great everything. You guys got a lot of smart people. So what was it like to actually, as this starts to evolve, the progression of the modernization, take us through where you guys are on progress, what are some of the cool things going on? What's the result of this shift? What are some of the notable highlights? It's really exciting because we really did take an approach of we've got to look at it, not just as AWS and a new tool, which you have to work so differently in DevOps and Agile. We said, okay, then we've got to figure out our processes to be able to work that way. We have to change as an organization. So we were more structured around those technical silos and we became a service management group. Who do we serve and what are they trying to accomplish? And that's the focus of everything we do. So from idea to service, we have a process to handle that. And AWS, we're all in on their tools too, so they completely facilitate that process. You got a lot of stakeholders. So you have impact at the student body level, faculty, institution overall. What are some of the game changes that you see? Obviously the ground station, you've got great R&D coming in with the Amazon. What's the impact? Digital transformation hub is part of the IT organization as well and our community outreach and giving students actual hands-on experience to work with the public sector, whether it be law enforcement or maybe a city is trying to deal with a homeless situation. They actually are engaged with professionals and learning about problems and solutions. And in 10 weeks, so we work on quarters and our quarters are 10 weeks, which align perfectly to exactly how long it takes an engagement with the digital hub to find what's possible in terms of solutions to problems. So talk about the students of today. I mean, we hear a lot about them and I want to hear you, you're teaching them. You're helping to educate this new generation of people who we hope will make huge, great waves in private industry as well as state, local and the federal government. What do you see as their strengths, their weaknesses and what are they looking at in terms of building careers? You know, I really do love working with the students. They are incredible. Makes me wonder sometimes like, I don't think I'd get into college now, but times have changed and they really care. They care, that's why the public, being able to work through these to serve the greater good of the public and share that data after actually means so much more to them than if it were just a class project because they want to make a difference. They care about social justice and making sure that we're green and efficient with how we use our earth resources. And so this maps around a lot of the challenges. The homelessness that I mentioned before and how we've worked with that or making sure that we can make cities safer. They care about that deeply and they have access to a lot of resources. This past fall's incoming class was born in the year 2000. They've never not known a time with computers. They do math homework. They're not reading. They're actually doing homework on their phones. They're very mobily engaged, very digitally engaged. And we're going to see wonderful things from them because they think so differently about these things. It sounds as though the education that you're providing is very practical in the sense that you're having your students work with these state and local governments on these issues like homelessness and buying climate change. Can you talk about some of the projects that they're doing? So our mantra is learn by doing. And you come in and you are admitted to a major and you begin working in that major right away. Every student finishes their last quarter with a senior project and you actually produce an outcome and have something you could talk about both as the product and the process to get there. I was recently invited to the senior project's showcase for the graphic arts department and in common they all had technology and somewhere one of the students that we had just contracted for some software and he, thank you so much. You helped make the difference with that. So that's neat when you get to see to make that difference. But even though it's graphic arts in every way technology was key to what they do. And they have really, students come from some great backgrounds too where they've had some great access to information and technology and really think differently about it. Engineering students are winning awards and doing really great things. So it's fun to see and be a part of. Great energy. What about the culture within your department itself? I mean, you're not only educating the next generation but you're also doing research yourself. Can you talk about, particularly as a partner, as working so closely with AWS which has such a famous culture of innovation and of taking risks and tolerating failure because the more failures you'll have, you'll ultimately get there someday. So can you talk a little bit about the culture within Cal Poly? It's hard because IT people are usually very analytical and there's a right and a wrong. So that sense of it's okay to get it wrong isn't popular generally. So that starts with me. I had to get up and say, you know, we may not get it right but rarely do we get it wrong. You know, we might get parts of it wrong, we adjust. It's okay to get it wrong. We've got to figure things out. All of this is new. And as I've been there longer and really work with people through different things, it's, they believe that for me now. There's not judgment. I once worked at a place where you go on your permanent record. Well, try and get somebody to try something innovative if you have a problem and it goes on your permanent record. So I don't have that now. Be a career ender. Yeah. I have a lot of people that are getting it and we're trying it and you can work so fast in the AWS environment that if it isn't right, blow it away. Some organizations, you're a renegade if you try something new. You know, oh my God, don't touch that third rail. Yeah. Here you guys are doing, it's progressive in the sense that you're trying new things. Learn by doing is a call to action but it also gives you that space to try. Yeah, be creative. It's learning. What's your impression of the show here in DC? I'll see. It's our fourth year covering public sector. I've been following them a couple of years early but first four years covering live broadcasting, reporting, but besides the growth, what's your takeaway? I need to be cloned. There are so many things happening here. You need a digital twin. You can solve that. There's going to be a lot of people that are going to say, no, don't clone her. Don't do it. But there's so much information and the innovation that AWS does, it's sometimes it's like exciting to hear and it's like, oh, where was that a month ago when we were working on that? So we just have to stay on our toes and we have to keep engaged with AWS and what they're doing and what we can use from them to make our environment better and move even faster to live service. It's keeping pace is also a hard thing because they're introducing so many new things. At Amazon. We're very fortunate again in our partnership. Actually that does translate into the ITU operations organization that we've been working with them on some services that they do. We could tell them, hey, this isn't quite working. And they honestly listen to us and deliver what we ask on a roadmap sometimes sooner than later too. So it's been a great partnership. That's interesting. A company that actually delivers on what you ask for. Exactly, exactly. And we have scale. There's, you know, it's a small town. There's 24,000 students. You have your faculty and staff. So when we try something with them, we have the opportunity for big impacts right away. That's awesome. Well, congratulations. Great work. Thank you. On the DX hubs, fascinating ground station. Great project for students and you guys to play around and help that grow. Because that's going to be a good service. Yes, we're excited. We can't wait to get going. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, Allison. Thank you. We will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit here in Washington DC. Stay tuned.