 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit virtual. Of course, this is theCUBE virtual. We are here sheltered in place in our quarantine studio. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Got a great guest here, CUBE alumni Ken Eisner who's the director of worldwide education programs for AWS Amazon Web Services. Ken, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. It's going to be a great segment. Looking forward to chatting. Thanks so much, John. Great to talk to you again. You know, obviously CUBE virtual, Public Sector Summit virtual, we've been virtualized as a society. Obviously the pandemic and all the things that are going on around it has been pretty crazy. And one of the things that's most notable is the impact on education. New York Times this morning and many published reports around the impact to college education. Not only economics on the campus side, the state of the people and the society in COVID-19 has pushed schooling online for the foreseeable future. What's your reaction as you're in charge? You've done a lot of work on the foundational level to get Amazon educational programs out there. Take a minute to explain how this has impacted you guys and your ability to bring that educational stuff to the foreseeable future. Yeah, the first thing I'd say is this truly is an absolutely unprecedented time. They're the move from virtual instruction, excuse me, from in-person classroom instruction into the virtual world at such amazing scale and rapidity is something that educational institutions weren't ready for. They couldn't be ready for it at this time. We had to enter it with amazing levels of empathy for what was going on on the ground in K-12 schools and higher ed schools with our educational technology and publisher providers. So I think the first thing was we had to, for the speed at which it happened, we did have to step back and look at what was going on. There are some changes that are happening in the immediacy and there are some things that COVID-19 has sped educational institutions around the world to look at. And AWS is working with those K-12 providers, higher educational providers, teachers and so on on that switch, whether it's providing infrastructure that move into online learning, helping teachers as they prepare for this sort of new normal. Some of the examples of what has happened, we've been working with the University of Arizona to help them stand up contact centers with the onset of COVID and students and teachers being pushed into their home environment or into virtual environments to give instruction, to receive instruction. There have been a lot of calls that happen in virtual environments to staff to help them support this. And so we stood up with the University of Arizona and Amazon Connect to help staff provide mobile solutions through their cell phone or computer for students. I want to get your thoughts, absolutely. I talked to Andy Jackson about this and I talked to him about Agility. This is the Amazon wheelhouse. I mean, you guys have gone into the IT world now. I mean, obviously developers, you win cloud native, you win that market, you won the enterprise IT market. But the reason why is that you took an old school outdated antiquated system of IT and made it agile. That seems enough, this is the country I've had with Teresa and Andy about education in public sector. The modernization is happening, but there's also the triage you guys have to do now in terms of getting people online. So what specifically are you doing to help education customers continue their instruction online because they still got to execute. They still need to provide this discussion around the fall window coming up. You got to have the foundational things. I know you've done that, but it's hard. So what's the nursing triage? When do you come out of this mode of, okay, here you go. And how do you get people set up and then how do they transform and reinvent? Yeah, at this time, the disaster recovery from, yeah, how do you get in that phase one with this immediate move was so prominent. And we're trying to work through that phase one and sort into sort of the phase two delivery of education, which is moving with scale and moving with agility into this world. Speed and agility are really going to be the new normal for education. There were some advances that just weren't happening quick enough. Students should always have access to 24-7 learning and access into that mobile arena. And they weren't having that. Several things that we did was we looked at our infrastructure and were some of those key infrastructure elements that help with both learning and work remotely. There were things such as Amazon work docs, which enables the virtual work spaces which enable virtual desktop environments and AppStream, which enables apps to be streamed through virtual arena onto your mobile or your desktop. Amazon Connect, as I mentioned before, there were services that were vital in helping speed into the cloud, those quick bursts into the cloud. And so we enabled some of those services to have special promotional or free rates for a given time period. And we have actually now extended that offering into the fall into September 30th. So first, we had to help people really quickly. With educators, so I run this program, AWS Educate, which is Amazon's global program to provide students and educators around the world with resources needed to help them get into cloud learning. But what we saw was that teachers around the world were not prepared for this massive shift. What we did to help that preparedness is we looked to our educators. We found that we did a survey over the weekend and found that 68% of them had significant experience or enough experience in teaching distance or online virtual education to potentially leverage that for other educators around the world. So we, and the other thing is teachers are really eager to help other teachers in this move, especially as they saw and they empathize with whether it was the panic or confusion or best practices in moving into that online arena. So we saw both that they had that experience and mass willingness to help other people. And we immediately spun up a series of educator and educator help tools, whether it was Amores Valdes or Noah Gift and Doug Berman providing webinars and office hours for other educators around the world. We also did a separate tech talks offering for students. So there was the help and scale, whether it's getting blackboard as they ramped up to over 50X of their normal load in 24 hours to help them deliver on that scale, whether it was the Egyptian ministry that was trying to, had to understand how could they help students access the information that they needed in speed. And they worked with Thinky, which is an educational technology provider to provide access to 22 million students who needed to get access online or whether it was the educator mobilization initiative that we ran through AWS Educate helps teachers have the resources that they needed with the speed that they needed to get online. This is, we are working, we are learning from our customers as this happens. This is a moving target, but we're going to move from this immediacy of pushing people into that virtual space into what's going to happen this summer as students need to recapture learning that they might have lost in the spring, or depending where you are worldwide, there's getting to your point all K-12, higher ed, and educational technology providers into the position where they can act with that agility and speed, and it's also helping those educators as they go through this. We're learning from our customers every day. Yeah, I want to get into some of those lessons, but one of the things I will say, you know I'm really bullish about what you do. Getting cloud education, I think is going to change the literacy and also job opportunities out there. I'm a huge believer that public sector is the next growth wave, just like IT was. And it's almost the same movie, right? You have inadequate systems, it's all outdated, you need these workloads need to run, and they need to run effectively, which you guys have done. But the interesting thing with COVID is it essentially exposes the scabs out there because online has been an augmentation to the physical space. So when you pull that back, people like me go, wait a minute, I have kids, I'm only trying to understand this learning impact. Everyone sees it now, it's almost like it's exposed, whether it's under provisioned VPNs or blackboards not working, and everyone's pointing their fingers, it's your fault. And so you brought this up, there's now stakeholders whose jobs depend upon something that's now primary, that wasn't primary before, whether it's the presenter, the content presenter, the teacher, certainly high availability, IT. All these things are just under huge pressure. So I got to ask you, what are the key lessons and learnings that you have seen over the past few months that you could share because people are shell shocked and they're trying to move faster. Yeah, so first of all, speed and agility and education are the new normal. They should have been here for a while, they need to be here now. When you've got a 30 year textbook, you're ruling over education, when students need to get the skills of tomorrow today, we need to be adapting quickly in order to give those students those skills, to give educational institution those opportunities. Every institution needs to be, enable virtual education. Every institution needs to have disaster recovery solutions and they weren't in place. These solutions need to be comprehensive. Students need access to devices, teachers need access to professional development. We need contact centers. We worked with Los Angeles Unified School District, not just to stand up a contact center which we did with Amazon Connect, but we also connected their high school seniors to with headphones. I think we provide 132,000 students with headphones. We are helping to source with through our Amazon business relationship, devices for everybody. Every student needs access in their home. Every student needs access to great learning and they need it on demand. Teachers need that readiness. I think the other thing that's happening is the whole world is again, speeding through changes that probably should have happened to the system already. That virtual learning is vital. Another thing that's vital is lifelong learning. We're finding that, and we probably should have already seen this, is everybody needs to be a student throughout their entire life and they need to be streaming in and out of education. The only way that this can be properly done is through virtual environments, through the cloud and through an access to on-demand learning. We believe that this, that the work that's being done, I was actually talking to some people in Australia the other day and they're saying, the government is moving away from degree centricity and moving into more modular stackable education. We've been building AWS Educate to stack to the job, to stack to careers. And that type of move into education, I think is also being sped. So we're seeing that move absolutely accelerate. We're also seeing the need to accelerate the speed to research. Obviously with what's gone on with COVID-19, there is a need for tools to connect our researchers to cures, to diagnostic opportunities. We've worked with the University of British Columbia, Vancouver General Hospital and the Vancouver, I'm gonna get this, the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute to develop, to use Amazon SageMaker to speed AI diagnostic tools. So that push towards research is absolutely vital as well. We just announced the $20 million investment in helping speed that research to market. So education needs to operate at scale. Education needs to operate at speed and education needs to deliver to a changing customer. And we've got to be partners on that journey. And I think I would just add reinvent a word you guys name your conference after every year. This is a reinvention opportunity clearly. And I was talking to some other parents that's like, I'm not going to send my kid to school online learning for Zoom interviews, I mean, Zoom classes. I'm like, hey, go get a cloud data engineering degree from Amazon Educate because they'll have a job like that. Once they put it on LinkedIn, the job skills are out there, the jobs are needed and the skills aren't. So I got to ask you, with this whole reskilling whether it's a gap year student in between semesters while this takes care of or upskilling people on the job, this is huge. World Economic Forum said by 2020, half of the employees will need to be reskilled or upskilled. This is a huge impact and even more focus with COVID-19. That's absolutely correct. I think one thing that's happened is we're, cloud computing has been the number one LinkedIn skill for the past four out of five years. The skill, whether it's software development in the cloud, cloud architecture, your data world, our cybersecurity and other operational roles, those are going to be in the most demand. Those are the skills that are growing and we need to be able to prepare people for roles in technology. The lifelong worker, the reskill, upskill opportunities, absolutely vital. Gap year is going to be available for some students, but we also got to look at how the, this, how COVID-19 can accelerate gaps between students. Every student needs access to high quality education. Every teacher needs to be equipped with the latest professional development. We've got to focus like a laser, not just on the people who could afford a gap year or the people who are going to some schools who actually had solutions that could immediately push their kids into their youth, their students in college or even employees who needed those reskills were all home, but it also needs to extend into the middle of, the middle of Los Angeles and into low income students in Egypt. I was really excited. We've been working with Northern Virginia Community Colleges. As I think you know, they were one of the lead institutions on launching an associate degree in the cloud. They took their courses and offered what they call a jump year to 70,000 high school senior or high school students in Northern Virginia and the Northern Virginia area, including enabling some of our cloud computing courses or the work courses that we worked on with them to those students. So those new partnerships, that extension of college into high school and college into reskill, upskill is absolutely vital, but institutions need to be able to move fast with the tools that the cloud provides into those arenas. Well, you know, I think you've got a really hard job to do there. It's foundational. I love what you're doing. And you know me, I've been harping people who watch theCUBE know that, you know, I'm always chirping and talking about how the learning is non-linear. It's horizontally scalable. There's different applications. You can't have an application for education. It's a series of different things. The workload of learning is completely different. I think, you know, to me what you guys are doing right now is setting that basics foundation infrastructure. It's like the EC2 S3 model. Then you got more on top of it platform. And I think ultimately the creativity is going to come from the marketplace. Whoever can build those workloads in a very agile, scalable way to meet the needs because let's face it, it can't be boring. Education is going to be robust, resilient and got to deliver the payload. And that's going to be customized applications that have yet to be invented, reinvented. Absolutely. Hopefully we're jump starting that next wave of innovation spreading the opportunities to all students. Hopefully we are really looking at those endemic issues in education and following leaders like University of Arizona and what the Ministry of Education in Egypt has done and Northern Virginia Community College. Hopefully we are really taking this, the opportunity of this disaster to invent on behalf of our students and bring it forward to the 21st century as opposed to just looking at this naval gazing what we do wrong in the past. This is an exciting opportunity, albeit a obviously scary one as we're all dealing with this endemic. There's no doubt once we retrench and get some solid ground post COVID-19, it's a reinvention and a reimagined growth market opportunity because you got changing technology, changing economics and changing expectations and experiences that are needed. These are three major things going down right now. Absolutely, absolutely. And to your point, the retraining of workers, the upskill, the great thing is that governments realize this imperative as do educational institutions and obviously students. This is, and we've seen what educators can do when they want to help other educators. This is an opportunity in our society to really look at everybody as a constant learner or a constant learner from our customers, everybody, there is no end to education. It cannot be terminal. And this is an opportunity to really provide the students, learners with skills that they need in an on-demand fashion at all times and rethink, re-innovate, reinvent the way we look at education in general. Now, I'll amend Jeff Bezos's day one. It's a new day one, right? So, there it is, we've got to reinvent. Ken, you're doing great work, director of worldwide education programs. Ken Eisner with Amazon Web Services. Certifications and degrees in cloud computing will be the norm. It's going to happen. Again, if you're a cloud data engineer, data scientist, you're going to get a job. I mean, no doubt about it. So thanks so much for sharing your insights. Really appreciate it. Thank you. John, thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it. Okay, Ken Eisner here. Inside theCUBE, virtual coverage of AWS Public Sector Online Summit. We've been virtualized. I'm John Furrier, host. Thanks for watching.