 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 wonderful Washington D.C. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We are welcoming Dave Levy to the program. He is the Vice President Federal Government at AWS. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you for having me. This is your first time, your first rodeo? It is my first time. Well done. Glad to be here. You know, CUBE alumni, welcome to the CUBE alumni club. Well, exactly, right, exactly. So you have been with AWS for about two years now. AWS famously has this day one mentality. I want you to talk a little bit about the culture of the company and how the culture helps create more innovative products and services. Yeah, and it is always day one. You know, you hear about that, but truly working in my first two years, you really get the experience when you're here every day, that excitement and that enthusiasm for customers. You know, it's interesting, somebody was asking me the other day, how do you get influence inside of Amazon? How do you get your points across? And in large part because Amazon's not a PowerPoint culture, being charismatic or having some of those traits really doesn't carry the day, what really carries the day inside of Amazon is what customers want. And so I can't tell you how many times in the first few years that I've been here that we have been in meetings going through our customer working backwards process where somebody has said, you know, wait a minute, we heard customers say we prioritize these four things versus these three things. And that kind of sentiment carries a lot of currency inside of the business for what we prioritize and what's important to us. And it's how we innovate on behalf of customers. So that's what happens every day. It happens day one at AWS. And it's been really exciting in these first few years. It's been a great form of the for Amazon's the long game as Bezos always says, Andy always says, you know, customer first, customer centric thinking. But this working backwards process we've learned come to learn it's very really critical within Amazon. But also making sure customers have the right journey, right? They get what they need. They get value, lower costs, eliminate the undifferentiated heavy lifting. I feel like I'm messaging for Amazon. I got memorized, said I've interviewed so many people from Amazon, I got to wrap down. But digital transformation is about the long game. So the shifts that are going on that aren't incremental small improvements. It's really moving the ball down the field big time. So you're seeing major shifts within customer base like the CIA did in 2013, which was initially a hedge against big data we heard on stage today, turned out to be a critical decision for their innovation. This modernization. Could you share some other customer experiences around this IT modernization trend that's totally real is happening right now in DC and public sector? Sure, I mean, there's a lot of examples. I mean, IT modernization is something that, it takes on a lot of different forms and a lot of different agencies think about it in different ways. But fundamentally it's about taking the systems that are serving citizens or a warfighter and allowing for an ability and an agility to do things better and faster and cheaper and doing it in a way that continues to innovate. And you see a lot of examples of that. I mean, we've, CCMS has the 76 million records of Americans on AWS. You see large data sets starting to be posted on AWS from agencies across the civilian sector. DoD is really starting to lean in on workloads that are traditional things like ERP. So- DoD is more than leaning in, they're really going big. The paper that they put out was very comprehensive. Yeah, I think there's a tremendous advantage from this digital transformation. And agencies are really just at the beginning of it. They're really beginning to see what flexibility it provides. I think the other thing that it's doing is it's really helping to modernize the workforce. It's allowing the IT workforce to start focusing on things that are really valuable instead of managing hardware or managing IT environment. Strictly, it's giving the ability to deliver solutions. And that's really exciting. That's what modernization is doing. One of the things that comes up in the modernization context is not that obvious on the mainstream press, but the whole red tape argument of government process. People process technology, we think we've done these conversations all the time. But in each one, the process pieces, red tape in all of them. People who go slower, the process has red tape in it. But this idea of busting through and cutting the red tape, all these bottlenecks, Theresa calls them blockers. Right, serve your word. These are real, now people are identifying that they can be taken away, not just dealing with them. Your thoughts and reaction to that? Yeah, well, I agree. I mean, there's a lot of opportunity. There's, digitizing workflows gives you the opportunity to re-examine all of these operational processes, which frankly may have been in place for very sound reasons in the past. But when you modernize and you digitize and you do it in a cloud way, you're going to start to see that some of those things and those processes that were in place really aren't necessary anymore. And it allows you to move faster, gives you more speed. And we're seeing that across customers in the US government. We're seeing it really everywhere. And one of the things you were saying too about the digitizing the workflow, it's really about ensuring that citizen civilians or members of the Armed Forces are interacting with government in a more meaningful way. I mean, that is the overarching problem that you're trying to solve here. It is, and it can be as simple as citizens getting the kind of content that they need from a modern website, accessing it quickly, going to higher level functions around chatbots and things like that. So these modern cloud architectures are allowing agencies to deliver services faster, deliver things to citizens in a way they haven't before. Could be citizens that need assistive technology. It's giving agencies opportunity to do things around 508 compliance that they haven't done before. So it's really opening up the aperture for a lot of agencies on what they can deliver. We've been doing a lot of reporting around Jedi, the DOD, obviously been following a lot of the white papers from a cloud perspective. We're not really in the political circle, so we kind of don't know sometimes whose toes we're stepping on when we kind of poke around. But one thing that's very clear from the agencies in our report, even here in the hallways this week, CIA and other agencies I've talked to, all talk about the modernization in context of one common theme, data. Data is the critical piece of the equation and it's multi-fold. It's single cloud with the workload objective or multiple clouds in an architecture like the DOD put out. So there's kind of clear visibility on what it looks like architecturally. Multi-clouds and hybrids, some pure public cloud, based on workloads, the right cloud of the right job. People are kind of getting that. But data is evolving. The role of data, because you got AI which is fed by machine learning, this really is a game changer. How is that playing out in conversations that you're seeing with customers? Talk about that dynamic because if you get it right, good things happen. If you get it wrong, you could be screwed. I mean, it's really one of those linchpin core items. Your thoughts? Every agency, virtually every agency we talk to, every customer we talk to is saying that data is the most important thing. They're data strategy. Data, we've all heard the same things. Data has gravity. Data is the new oil. So there's a lot of ways to characterize it. But once you have the opportunity to get your data both unstructured and structured, in a place, in a cloud, in an environment where you can start to do things with it, create data lakes, you can start to apply analytics to it, build machine learning models and AI, then you're really starting to get into delivering things that you haven't thought about before. And up until then, it's been tough because the data in a lot of our customers has been spread out. It's been in different data centers. It's been in different environments. Sometimes it's under somebody's desk. So this idea of data and data management is really exciting to a lot of our customers. A lot of people don't understand that there's also down, and this is what we're hearing from customers as well, is that they set up the data lakes, whatever they're calling it, data strategy, data lake, whatever. Then there's downstream benefits to having that data that just materialized. And as an anecdote to it, as you look at the ground station effort, we've had a couple great interviews here about ground station, which I love by the way. I think that's totally the coolest thing because the real impact is going to be great backhaul, IoT is going to boom, blossom from it. But it only happens because you got Amazon scale. So again, data has that similar dynamic where as you start collecting and managing it in a holistic way, new things emerge, new value emerges. What are some of those things that you're seeing with your customers there? I would say there are like real world challenges that our customers have to deal with with data, right? When you start to have volumes, terabytes, petabytes of data, they've got decisions to make. Do they expand the wall, knock out a wall and expand their data center and buy more appliances which require more heating, more cooling? Maybe they do do that, but there's an alternative now. There's a place for that data to go and be safe and secure. And they can start doing the things that they want to do with that data. And like you said, downstream effects, there are some things that they can do with that data that they don't even know about today, right? And ground station's a good example of that. You talk to people in the military, for example, because we just had Keith Alexander on general, the general was on. You know, they think tactical edge, using data, save lives, protect our nation, et cetera. But there's also the other benefit of it that has nothing to do with the tactical. It's the business value. The enablement is a huge conversation that you hear in these modernization trends, not just the benefits tactically, but the enablement setup. Talk about that dynamic. Well, you think about the data that is collected. I mean, you think about the valuable data at the VA and that has potential implications for population health. And so this day is just enormously valuable. I think we're at the very beginning of what we can do with some of these things. Across federal civilian, I mean, you look at agencies like Department of the Interior and some of the data sets they have are just fascinating what we can do. We've got millions of visitors to our national parks every day. And we don't know what's possible with a lot of those data sets. Talk about some of the tools and techniques that are being used to work with that data and talk about AI and machine learning and how they have been a real game changer for some of your federal customers. Well, you know, ML and AI is really, we're really at the very beginning of this transformation. I mean, I think in the fullness of time, the vast majority of applications are going to be effused with machine learning and artificial intelligence. And I think that that day is not too far away and they're using tools on our platform like SageMaker to make predictions in this data. And one of the great things about having a platform that has really three different parts to the stack, which are machine learning, that's where you have your frameworks. I say that's where all the really, really smart people live, all the data scientists that we're also desperate for. And then you've got that middle layer, which are tools like our SageMaker, which everyday developers can use. So if you've got geospatial data and you're trying to determine what's in a given area, you can, everyday developers can use SageMaker to build machine learning models. Those are some of the things they're doing, very exciting. Hey, I want to get your thoughts on a comment that Theresa Carlson just made earlier today. I think, I'm not sure she said this on camera or not, but it was memorable. She said it used to be an aha moment with the cloud, but this year it's not, it's real. People now recognize that cloud adoption, it's legit, proof is in the- It's new normal. It's the proof is in the pudding, it's right there, you can start seeing evidence, you know, all the doubting people out there can now see the evidence and make their own, it's clear. Cloud is a great benefit, grace disruption. As this continues to increase, and it is, numbers are there, I see the business performance, what are the challenges and drivers for continued success? I think the first conversation starts with Theresa's spot on, as she always is. I think the first conversation starter is always cost savings. That was the way everybody thought about the cloud in the beginning, and I think there are cost savings that customers are going to realize, but I think the real value, the real reasons why customers do it is there's an agility that happens when you move the cloud that you don't necessarily have in your other environments. There's the ability to move fast, to spin up a lot of capability in just a few minutes, and just even minutes, and change the experience for users, change the experience for citizens. I think the other thing that cloud is delivering is this whole breadth of functionality that we didn't really have before, we talked about machine learning and AI, but there are tools around IoT now. There's Greengrass on AWS, which is simply AWS IoT inside, and places like John Deere, we have 100,000 of telematically enabled tractors sending data back to planners. So customers are getting involved because there's this huge breadth of functionality. I think, and so that's exciting. Those are the enablers, that's what's driving. I think some of the things that are getting in the way is we've got a workforce, by and large, especially in the federal government. Well, this is new, and that learning is happening, that enablement is happening about cloud. We're teaching about security in the cloud. It's a shared responsibility model. So it's the new normal, we know it can be done in the cloud, but now there are some new paradigms about how to do it, and AWS and a lot of our partners are out there talking about how to get that done. I want to get a double down on that because one of the things that we're doing a report on and investigating is kind of a boring topic, but it's probably hits your world right on, which is how Amazon bare knuckled their way into this market through cost savings, the federal government obviously has a great lead because they care about cost savings. A financial institution in Wall Street might not care about cost savings, they might want arbitrage on the other side, but again, government's government. You guys have earned, done the work to get all the certifications, Rhesus team has done that, now you're at the beginning of the next level, but procurement is really broken, right? I was talking to an official on an interview off the record, and he said, and I'll say his name if I can say it here, he said, you know, we're living procurement in the 80s, we still have a requirement to ship a manual on a lot of these things. So the antiquated inadequate procurement process is lagging so much that the technology shifts are happening in a shorter period of timeframe, Amazon ensures just thousands of new services every year at reinvents, Jassy's biggest slide, thousands, next year it'll be probably 5,000, who knows, it'll be a big number. That's happening, all this is happening right now really fast, but procurement's like lagging behind it, really stunting the innovation equation, growth of innovation. Your thoughts on fixing that, how you get around it, all these old tripwire rules. Well, first I'll say, you know, procurement reform is something that's on everybody's mind. I mean, this is, you know, it's not just, it's not just a blocker for cloud, it's a blocker for everybody. I mean, technology is far out basing what our federal government can do. So I don't, there's nobody that I talk to that thinks that we're headed in the right place with procurement reform, even our customers inside of the government. So I think what I'd say is it's really a collective approach, it's an industry approach that's going to be taken to change a procurement, to help them adapt modern laws. I, you know, do we need changes in the far perhaps? Yes, but I think we need fundamental policy changes, legislative approach to change procurement for technology. It's only going to get, it's only going to move faster. You're right, Andy announced in 2018, I think nearly 2,000 services, so you can expect there's going to be more this year. Part of that is understanding new models. Our marketplace, for example, is a way to buy and access software quickly, fast, even by the hour, if necessary. That's a totally- Like ground station, in that way. By the minute, if necessary. So it's a totally new paradigm. As far as how we're approaching kind of now, it takes having good partners. We have good partners that are helping us with respect to contract vehicles. I think we're being transparent around how we bill, how these services translate, what's in the services that they're getting charged. And I think agencies are starting to feel more comfortable with that. I learned a term from Charlie Bell, the engineer lead for Amazon, they did an interview, a term you guys use internally at Amazon called dogs not barking. Yes. And it means that everyone, the barking dog everyone hears, and they go have, they look, solve that problem. It's what you don't see, the blinds, AKA blind spots. What do you see in federal that's not barking, that you're aware of? What keeps you up at night? What are our dogs not barking? You know, I would say it really is our customer workforce. I think our customers really need to get enablement and training and support from us and the partner community on how to make this transition to cloud. And it's incumbent upon us and it's incumbent upon the agencies to really deliver that. That does keep me up at night because this is new. This is new for the ATO process is a little bit different. The accreditation process is different. So there's a lot of new things out there. And if there's a dog that's not barking, it's somebody needs help and they're not really letting us, they don't know they need help but they're not saying that they need help and they don't know where to go. Great, thanks for coming on. Dave, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Yeah, thank you, all right. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have more from the CUBE AWS public sector summit. Stay tuned.