 Welcome to the special program series by theCUBE, Women of the Cloud, brought to you by AWS. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to welcome my next guest, Tia Duboussin, President Co-Founder of Bell Flurr Technologies. Tia, welcome to the program. It's great to have you. Thank you so much, Lisa. I'm very happy to be here. Thank you. Tell me a little bit about you, a little bit about Bell Flurr Technologies and your kernel. Yeah, so myself. A little bit about me, I'm actually a former microbiologist. So we'll talk a little bit more about that and my journey into tech and shifting over into helping others, right? Bell Flurr Technologies was birthed. Basically after I got a wake-up call in the lab and saw that data was really going to be driving a lot of decision-making, in not so near future, which we're seeing now. And that was probably good 11 years ago and you're seeing almost data-driven everything or at least conversations about that now. So I have to say that was a good shift and how we help customers. We're a consulting partner. And so helping them to make a journey that maybe I made on maybe more of an individual level to shift into what does that look like? You have data, but gaining the value out of it to actually make decisions. And so helping our customers to actually do the assessment around the type of data that they have, taking them through a process all the way through to insights that they could then look at, how can they monetize that? Is where we actually play and that is our specialty. Okay, my heart skipped a beat when you said you were a microbiologist because that's what I studied in undergrad. Oh my gosh. Oh. Isn't that crazy? I'm super excited about that. Yes. And I got a segue into tech as well. So we could chat for hours about that, I'm sure of it. But you bring up such a great point and especially science being so data-driven. Every industry is data-driven. Every company has to be a data company and to help organizations really understand where their data is. It's growing obviously continuously exponentially and how to extract value from it is where a lot of organizations really struggle. So it sounds like that Bell Floor comes in and really helps organizations to tackle that challenge so that they can extract value from the data that will give them that competitive advantage that they're looking for. Absolutely, absolutely Lisa. So talk to me a little bit about your career path that was Zigzaggy, which I love, so was mine. What are some recommendations that you would have for others watching this program that are really looking to step that ladder in tech from a career perspective? Well, I think if I pull from my own individual experience and I would definitely say when you have that aha moment, try to investigate a little bit more about that. I was blessed in the sense that I was married to a computer scientist, so I was able to go home and kind of tell him, hey, I just saw a demonstration that blew me away. We were doing drug discovery work and we were gonna be able to use a computer program to basically help us to narrow the focus of our drug discovery work, to see which drugs would be most active before we even synthesize them. And so that was gonna save us a lot of money, a lot of time. Drug discovery work is a guessing, it's a guessing game. Anyhow, so if a computer can actually make a million different compounds in a month, I knew that was way more than me and the whole team could make at the bench and then order them by activity. So I came home and I told him that and he said, oh, in 10 years, everything will be data driven, no doubt. And we started to have these conversations and so then I started to then investigate a little more. I started taking courses, dusting off my Python, my R, trying to see where else is data king and basically it was everywhere. I wasn't seeing a lot of people at that time really using their data. There was really dark data still, right? They were collecting it, but not really using it. And so I said, I think this is something I can help companies do. And I was really excited to really learn more about that. So I started to go learn, pick up certification. So then I'm starting to reinvest in myself. I would really highly advise you once you find that this is part of your passion, find a mentor. I was, thankfully, I was already married to a mentor but there are other mentors and he wasn't my only mentor, there were others, right? To help you along this journey because no one person rules, I think rules it all, right? When you're trying to make this journey and try to make this shift because it is complex. And so you wanna make sure you have your tribe, right? That's gonna get you there. And you wanna make sure that you can contribute to the tribe. So I always tried to find ways that I could actually contribute to different projects, right? Even if they're open projects, hackathons, go to boot camps, a lot of them are free. Some of them not so free but pretty close. And I think it's kinda lowers that bar to access where you can kinda take a little peek and you can even go to some that are driven from an area that you're interested in. If you're interested in healthcare, do a hack for good around healthcare. Try to get involved. You'll meet a lot of good people that I think will be very happy to help steward you along the way as you try to navigate these waters because there is no straight path, right? There is no A plus B gets you to C. You really kinda have to navigate those waters but I would definitely say get the exposure. Make a decision around your passion. Meet nice people at boot camps, workshops, hackathons and then go for some of those industry certifications. Do an online search and find out what are the top 10 certifications that would help to support a role that you're looking for, right? In the area that you're passionate about and then invest in yourself. Study for it, go for those things. Make plans, right? And bounce those off of your mentor. I think they'll be very impressed that you laid out plans and you're actually meeting those goals. They'll be more inclined to actually invest back in you as well. Absolutely and I love how you said invest in yourself. You laid out some really great tactical recommendations and guidelines. There's very few paths do I come across in tech that have been linear. Most of them have been like yours and mine, very zigzaggy. But the most important thing is investing in yourself and sometimes I'll hear people say things like create a personal board of directors. And that kind of reminded me of some of the things that you said to have those mentors, have those sponsors to your point after you invest in you and have those folks invest in you as well. That's great advice, yeah. Awesome, thank you so much, yeah. Absolutely, we have to invest in each other. I think that that's the better together story here, right? I think you too, it's got to be symbiotic. I'll bring up a biology word for you, symbiotic. Yes, symbiotic. Yes, let's talk a little bit now about some of the specific projects where you've helped either internal customers or external customers solve problems related to cloud. Yeah, so I would say from an internal customer standpoint, that's what we call our employees, our RBFFs, right, our Belfler friends. We wanna make sure that we're investing in them just as much as we do our external customers. You have helped happy internal customers, you're definitely without a shadow of a doubt gonna be able to solution and really have happy external customers. So everything starts at home first, right? So far as success stories, I would say from the internal customers is really looking at how to upskill and reskill not just junior talent, but senior talent. Probably over the last two and a half years, we've been working very closely with a couple of nonprofits, community colleges that now have cloud computing certificates that you can get and also bachelor's degrees and actually creating a talent pipeline, a playbook for a talent pipeline to reskill and upskill to make sure that people have the skill sets that are in market today. We were seeing that there was a gap between classroom and industry as we were trying to hire. And so we wanted to be a part of the narrative not just point out the problem but how can we really dig in there? And so it's been tested tried and true this playbook over 300 different interns as well as apprentices. So we're super excited to actually have a playbook that we're able to pull from that we're now sharing with our external customers. They are also struggling with the talent pipeline. They said, hey, you come and you build these solutions. So internally we need to be reskilled and we need to be skilled up and how can we work alongside you and your team not just to build out the solution but for the longer term how can we actually build out a bench that's healthy, right? That can keep up with the pace, right? That cutting edge pace of innovation and get right in there. And so it's been really great to work with a good majority of our customers are very quite interested into how we don't have that playbook internally or that process internally, which tends to be a challenge. So I would say so far as cloud computing in addition to just solving technical problems that is something in parallel that you equally have to give a lot of respect to, right? Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of the talent pipeline I wanna get your thoughts on where we are with respect to diversity. We talk about DE and I a lot in technology but there's still challenges there. What are some of those challenges that you see and how can organizations really correct those challenges to build a diverse talent pipeline? That's a great question. I would say the challenges I would call them the three A's access, acceleration and acceptance. And I think what we've found with just doing this journey in the last two and a half years really documenting what are those challenges and how can we iterate to just kind of just get past those challenges and just blow right through the doors and say, hey, there's ways that we can introduce access. And so joining forces like we said with those nonprofits and those community colleges that are already, I think we all have different pieces of the puzzle and I think we're all trying to give different pieces of access, but how do we draw a thread through it? And I think that's what our playbook attempts to do. I mean, because when we say in tech, that is so vast. And so even within tech, we say, okay, within tech, these are the areas where we play, right? We have a playbook around data and analytics and we're now working for one on machine learning. And so we're looking at individuals that are coming from backgrounds that maybe are not typical, right? Maybe not a computer science degree. Maybe they're biologists like ourselves. Maybe that's how they started. Maybe they're psychologists. We have a few psychologists on the team. We have accountants on the team. And so what happens is that we're able to go into these different groups that we're partnered with and actually showcase to them from an access standpoint, how is tech really intersecting? I don't like to use the word disrupting, but intersecting with the traditional accounting degree, with the traditional biology degree. Did you know that this was happening? And try to pique their interests. And if they're interested in learning more, taking them through that process, a very similar process that I had to make that decision over a decade ago to really look at ways to rescale myself. And so we've put together different programs with those nonprofits and the colleges and other partners as well to make sure that we're moving them along the way and the path of access. And then also giving some acceleration around some of the different programs. Some of the colleges are giving scholarships which is awesome and some of their partners to accelerate some of the people through our program to actually get some of those skill sets that are very applicable. Helping them to understand how their psychology background actually plays a part in that. So really not using random examples, but really examples from their traditional learning and saying, this is how this applies in the tech world. And so then it really helps to lower that bar, right? So that they can really not only have access, but really accelerate because now it's applied. And so when you are able to then apply it, show them how it can be applied in other industries, right? Whether they're similar or not, we all have data and data takes a very similar path in an interesting way. So once they're able to dive in there and then the acceptance. So then making those partnerships with our customers and other industries that maybe don't have this talent pipeline but would like to have that, they partner with us for the pipeline. And so making sure that either they land with us or with one of our customers where they can now showcase what they've learned. They can go in and be more maybe more junior at those companies, but they're able to grow over a two year cycle with that company that has an agreement that they're actually going to nurture them that talent and really invest back in people who've invested in themselves. I love what you just described before, A's. It's so intentional and I think that's what a lot of organizations miss with respect to diversity is it's not done with intention and interest as it should be, but it sounds like what you've developed is a fantastic playbook to provide access, to provide that ability to accelerate, to be able to apply their skills. Really kudos to that because my cheeks were hurting from smiling with what you were describing. It's so needed and there's so much opportunity out there, especially for people who might be on a zig or a zag and not sure what to do next, showing them the, giving them the access, showing them what they can do and how it applies to their industry with data is, that's where the world is going. So I love that, very exciting. Last couple of questions for you as we wrap up our time here. What are some of the things that you see next in cloud that are evolving that excite you about where we're going? I'm super excited. It brings you back to the A's. I think that companies of all sorts, right, have already gotten a lot of access because they can build a, they can build a, not a server farm, but necessarily they can have the power of the same computing, right? As some of the larger enterprises, whether you're a startup or a smaller, medium-sized business. So I'm super excited that it's going from, I think, more of a solution conversation where you're a lot closer to the end goal even from the first assessment conversation and less of an infrastructure kind of conversation where you're talking about the different services around cloud computing and, you know, inside those. And so I'm super excited about that. I think you'll see a lot of solutions being kind of more or less pre-baked, ready for those buy versus build conversations. You'll still have to configure, you'll still have to integrate, but I think we're gonna all live around the API. I see a lot of APIs, you know, driving some really great SaaS applications that are really then connecting data to everything. And then it's not just about having that data that can then be shared across the organization, but even organizational units across the enterprise can self-serve from those analytics and those insights. Instead of, you know, I think back up, one of our customers, they were a manufacturer and really it was their accounting team that brought us in. And they said, listen, we need to get insights during a manufacturing run to make decisions if we're profitable or not. Right now, we don't, we're manually trying to wrangle the data as accountants across different, you know, even different states, right, to get this information. And we're not getting the insights and we're scratching the surface because we don't have that time until a month after it's already shipped. There's really at that point, you can't make a decision. And so they really wanted to change that. They really wanted to look at profitability. They really wanted to look at how can we go back to just being accountants? Like we don't want to be data wranglers. And I think a lot of our customers are in that boat. They don't want to manually wrangle data. How can you help us to at least make it to where it's more of a self-service and we're consuming not the data, but the insights, right? So we can be actionable on the insights. And that's what I'm super excited about. And that's what I think you'll see become easier and easier for companies to be able to do with cloud computing. Which is so exciting because the frontier is endless. But as every company, whether it's a retailer or a manufacturer or a life sciences organization have to be a data company these days. There's no choice. You have to be able to serve customers. Because of course, we have the demand as consumers in our personal lives and our business lives. We want that data to deliver relevant content to us. And so organizations have to work with folks like you to be able to do that. Yeah, it's been such a pleasure having you on the program. Thank you so much for giving us some of your time, walking us through your interesting background and some of the great techniques that you're employing at your company to really help drive organizations to be successful with the talent pipeline, with the cloud. We really appreciate your insights. Thank you so much, Lisa. Appreciate you, the Cube and AWS as well. Thank you. Yeah, you're very welcome. For Tia DuWasson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this Cube's special program series, Women of the Cloud brought to you by AWS. Thanks for watching.