 Hi everybody, welcome back to London. I'm Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise and we've been following AWS generally in the public sector specifically for a number of years now. We've seen the ascendancy of an expansion of public sector. We've covered the career of Teresa Carlson and we're here in London ahead of AWS Summit London. There's a pre-day here. There's a number of public sector companies. There's a focus on healthcare. Kiran James is here. He's the founder of wonderful.org. Wonderful.org is a fundraising vehicle. It's really set up a platform essentially for self-service. Kiran, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Hello. So tell me about wonderful, why you started this organization. Wonderful was kicked off when I got to my 50th birthday essentially as a way to give back. I've been involved in the tech sector for many years and we were sitting on quite a lot of infrastructure. We thought we had some spec capacity as well and we thought what we can do with a resource, human and physical, in terms of giving something back to charities. So one of the things that looked like a great opportunities was to set up a completely fee-free fundraising platform and essentially that's what we kicked off with a brief of concept in 2016. So fee-free meaning I can come in, I can set up my own fundraising vehicle so all the money goes to the recipients. 100% we have no charges whatsoever to charities, to donors, to fundraisers and essentially all the card processing fees as well are covered and through the generosity of AWS and it's NPO program, we've been able to also cover things like hosting as well which has been phenomenal for us because it really does enable us to give every single penny to charity. So how do you fund your staff? The staff currently and our model going forward if it's one that we continue to support, if we can continue to support is through Secumbent. So we've seconded our technical resource from my day job, which is essentially running a telecoms business and those guys are incredibly generous with their time so evenings and weekends have been devoted to setting up and maintaining the platform. We've called in favours from people that have networked with over the years. So again, when we moved beyond proof of concept into the current website now and the current build we were able to get that done with some cost but albeit a fraction of what we would have paid commercially and essentially as we move forward we want the whole concept of wonderful.org to become something much bigger than just the organisation. It's kind of a vehicle for commercial organisations to do good. So lots of in kind contributions, lots of your time obviously. So when did you start the organisation? 2016 and essentially we went through what I describe as a proof of concept. We set three broad milestones. One was the first 100 charities on board, first 100,000 pounds of revenue or charity not really revenue but charity donations through the website and we launched our first wonderful week where we brought some sports celebrities including Phil Neville, now the manager of the England women's football team. He came on board to do some kind of charity work for us with his family. Once we passed through those three milestones it was then a case of saying, okay, we've achieved all of these. Now let's push the button and actually do this properly in inverted commas and that's when we kind of looked at hosting the thing properly, looked at the commercial build and so on. So those milestones are really kind of the proof of the concept but they're pretty substantial milestones and you hit them pretty fast. We did hit them fast but again to give you some context on that the first 100,000 through the website probably took us, I would guess, between 12 and 14 months. In the last 28 days we've processed about quarter of a million pounds through the website so the growth has been phenomenal and the appetite from the charities is enormous. What's particularly interesting about our sector is that whilst a lot of the events that take place like the London marathon and so on are very predictable we know exactly the date and time that people are going to be donating. Clearly you'll get events that are completely unpredictable. We've got to be able to respond and be available for donors to give when those kinds of things happen. Okay, so this leads me to the conversation about your infrastructure and obviously the cloud. When you started the organization you had sort of your own on-premises infrastructure, correct? So take us through sort of what that looked like and your decision to move to the cloud. Expensive, disjointed, very complex. So we were running essentially a kind of full stack on a number of servers that were hosted independently. Co-location was expensive, maintenance was expensive. Even things like getting to site were expensive and if there were rare occasions when you do have to do that in a hurry it can be quite time consuming particularly as I say given our profile where these guys are really doing it for love not money. So it became apparent to us, I think learning from some scenarios that we've seen in the real world with other platforms as well when even the predictable events had still created some concerns for some of the charities in terms of availability. So we took a long hard look at what we had and said, are we scalable? Are we fully available? Probably not. We need to look at this in some detail now. So that was when we kind of completely re-architected the website and looked at AWS. So it was not only a matter of like say scaling up for high demand and unpredictability but you had a sort of a fragile infrastructure. We did. And essentially equivalent of volunteers trying to keep it together. Exactly. So that's not a good formula for high availability. No, absolutely not. So how does that change with the cloud? With the cloud I think what we've got now is we've got a really good view of everything. We've got a view of the whole of our infrastructure kind of in one place. So it gives our operations director a lot more peace of mind because you can see all of the resources at his disposal. I think in terms of security, it's far, far better for us as well because we can manage access to various components available US depending on who needs access. So our web developers are currently remote. They're not formally part of the organization. So we can restrict access to things that we don't want to have access and so on and give them full access where it's required. So I think that's been a lot of peace of mind for the operations director and just having that confidence in clearly a brand that's got a huge reputation and people feel immensely confident about seeing. So for us being able to put the AWS badge on the website to reinforce to our users, to our donors that were kind of here, were solid, were stable, were not going anywhere is really, really important. Anyway, you said up front AWS has some skin in the game. They're providing some services and some contributions. So that's got to be pretty substantial for you guys. Massive, absolutely massive. Meaning all honesty, it's second only to card processing which is a significant cost of doing our business and one which is paid for by our other corporate sponsors. It's our second biggest cost without a doubt or would be if it were a cost, but mercifully AWS has kind of come to the rescue and we're able to do what we're doing now. So corporate sponsors, give a little commercial. How does that work? Well, essentially our biggest corporate sponsor, our main partner at the moment is the cooperative bank and they have underwritten all of our card processing fees for the duration of that partnership. The big kind of caveat with that is that we don't know what they will be and whilst we can provide some forecast based on empirical evidence, worst case scenario, there's another tragedy. People reach for their wallets and give and suddenly that can go through the roof in the course of a couple of weeks. So the difficulty in bringing corporate sponsors on for us is just that kind of unpredictability of the sector that we're operating in but they've been tremendous. That's amazing, right? Because like I say, that's a big chunk of your cost along with your infrastructure but I'm fascinated by this organization and just want to congratulate you on the mission and actually getting it off the ground because when we give to a charity, we always ask, okay, well, what are the administrative costs behind this? You go to the website and you look it up and sometimes you just don't feel comfortable and so what you've done is you've essentially just eliminated that overhead. Completely. And where do you see this going? I mean, you've got what, 1,500 registered charities now? Yes, yeah, we're up to 1,500. Again, we've had a couple of fairly major events we were endorsed by the money-saving expert at number one but kind of how could they not put us at number one? It would have been very odd if they hadn't given that we're the only completely fee-free platform. That clearly creates the demand and I think that endorsement was a huge catalyst to the growth more recently. We've seen other things, BT My Donates actually pulled out of the sector which has caused a lot of charities to migrate to our platform as well. In terms of where we see it going, we will need to continue to raise money from corporate sponsors to support it but there's a real kind of step game in that. We have to manage that growth to meet their expectations as best we can but equally new corporate sponsors coming on board will want to see that we've got enough eyeballs to make it worth that while getting behind the organization. So it's that constant kind of game of trying to bring on the next round of funding and getting people through. How global do you see this getting? How today and in the future? Conceptually, there's no reason at all why this shouldn't be a global phenomenon but we're now very concentrated on the UK just because of our resource and we do get requests all of the time for international charities, for international fundraisers and so on but we've got to be realistic about what we can support. But going back to the point that I made earlier, it really isn't about wonderful.org, it's about just corporations, fundraisers, charities, donors, we see all of the last three being wonderful all of the time by the nature of what they do. We're just trying to get more corporations to be as wonderful as sounds terribly sycophantic but AWS has been in supporting what we're doing. It's that kind of that sense of what we're trying to achieve here that goes beyond one organization. Well, and the cloud allows you to scale potentially to the extent that you can get the resource. There's no reason you can't go global. No. I'm going to check it out and see even for a little local charity, can I participate? Absolutely. What does that involve? Do you have to have some kind of minimum threshold or no, anybody can? Anybody, you need to be a registered UK charity with one of the UK registrars. Beyond that, we go through a little bit due diligence with the charities so we will need to see some documentation. So there's a little manual stepping on board in charities but for all the right reasons we want to be diligent about the people using the platform to give the fundraisers the confidence that they're donating to a charity. So we don't do any peer to peer fundraising. It is literally you will register as a charity and the fundraisers can support your charity often led by the fundraisers rather than the charities. Interestingly, so the fundraisers will be saying to the charities why are you not on this platform which gives you everything and you're already on this platform which doesn't. So there's quite a lot of pressure now coming from the fundraisers to pull the charities in. So there's a lot of word of mouth, a lot of peer to peer. Absolutely. Right, you don't really have the funding and the budget to go market. Not at all, absolutely not. Well, hopefully this will help. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate your time. All right, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante, you're watching theCUBE. We'll be back right after this short break from AWS HQ in London. Right back.