 From Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back everyone. It's theCUBE coverage. We are here for Amazon Web Services Summit in Bahrain in the Middle East where cloud computing is changing the game for startups, businesses and the government and society. Amazon announcing their new regions up and running. We've got two great guests to talk about all the integration and opportunities. We have the same with this who's the CEO of Acme and we have Jerry and Abram who's the general manager of Computer World. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me. Thank you John, I'm so excited to be here. Thank you John. It's a great day. It's a bigger venue than last year. It's our second time here but what's striking from this event is the explosion of innovation, not just startups. You're seeing the businesses, large global ISVs are here. Seeing new ISVs, new software environments and the demand for cloud computing is off the charts. So, there's a real need thirst for cloud computing. Absolutely. What's your assessment? I believe that most customers have started to look into digital transformation and customers have started to buying into a new experience of moving from on-prem into cloud. And I think that's a great story because customers are looking to move from capex to opaque and driving innovation and driving more for their businesses. And the cloud first message here in Bahrain has been mandated from the top. Absolutely. And that's been, of course, all the ministries to do it. Yes. That's changing the citizen relationship to society which includes entrepreneurs and business. And now they got to integrate it in. The banking system's behind it. So, good business for you guys. What's the business impact? Good business, very promising business. I think we are on the right track with cloud business, with AWS in particular. Just to add to what Abby has mentioned, I think it's the entire ecosystem which is working well for the whole cloud objective. I was just with one of the gentlemen who was from one of the universities. He's teaching there. And what he mentioned to me, that we have been giving students, good students to you who were like on the verge of getting certified. Now we are going to make them certified and hand them over to you. So we'll have ready made people available to us. I think the policies right from the cloud first policy, you know the banking policies, as well as the awareness that AWS has got to the market, it's been a game changer all of a sudden. And it's causing, well you got pipeline for talents that's going to allow people to participate. Yep. Yes. Has there been a business driver behind all this? What's been the big business benefit besides the mandates? Have you seen from customers? Is it software development? What's the driver? What's the business driver? The key driver has been, you know, every entity would like to have an edge in the business. You know, it's no more of the old days where you have the set, you know, competitors. You all of a sudden see new faces, new companies who become big challengers. I think the very need to face this challenge as well as the desire to grow more and do more, which is driving the whole cloud momentum. You know, one of the things is agility. We've heard that message here. And we go to all the other cloud events. Agility, agility, agility, data, data, data, compute, storage, networking. Less about storage network because that's become elastic, it's available. That's what Amazon brings to the table. So data and agility now drive a lot of the business conversation because now they got to hire software developers. We need to build on top of something. That's going to be Amazon or something else. This is a big part of the business architecture. True. What are some of the things that you guys have done? Can you talk in generalities or some of the projects? We have looked at the elasticity of the platform. We looked at the scalability of the platform, what it brings to end customers and how do we build innovation? Bringing in new technology that helps customers take insight from their existing data and build on to it. What are some of the challenges that you guys have seen that are now available to be overcome? That weren't maybe a few years ago. I think the overall resistance to adapting to cloud. I think that was one of the major challenges that we've seen a couple of years back because people felt that going to cloud is going to hinder the way they do their job, the work. In addition to that, the cloud brought in a lot of security related issues where people were not aware but today people are embracing it. Customers have started to embrace technology because they see value in cloud then on premise. The culture of fear, the job change, and then the security are being addressed. The banks are going cloud. That's a good tell sign. Absolutely. And there are a lot of IELTS fees that brings in resilient solutions that addresses customer requirements. What's the number one conversation you have with customers? Security. How do we build further on the cloud? How do we take core applications into cloud and take it into modernizing them? How do we take our digital transformation strategy moving forward? Your conversations? I think we talk about longevity in terms of how the business can move forward and stay in the game for a longer time. That's how the discussion starts. Then we start talking about what it needs to modernize the applications so that you have the agility to address newer opportunities, to have the growth that you always wanted to have. And of course, the awareness and education that has happened in this country in particular in the recent times, that has helped us a lot. We are no more talking about the challenges with security, whether it's going to be secure in cloud or not. We're talking about how the business is going to behave once they make the move. I got to put you guys both on the spot with a question. I'd like you both to answer it because I think any commerce we go to, it's always the hallway conversations that are interesting because what happens on the hallways, you see someone you know, you mentioned before we came on camera, you see people here, everyone knows each other, it's growing. What are some of the hallway conversations that you guys have had here that you could share with folks watching? We need to adopt to cloud. We need to build our strategy on cloud. We need to look at innovations. If it is government, it's about more services that they can offer. It's a non-government sector. The new revenue streams that they can generate deal with the conversation that I have. Business deals done. Come on, come on. You got some deals happening. Yes, we're getting a lot of good traction, but people showing a lot of interest in new areas of business. I've found that's three types of companies in digital transformation. One's that know they got to do it. People that are doing it might get stuck a little bit and folks that are done it and like, wow, maybe I can do it over again. Or are successful. So three kind of phases. How would you categorize the market here in terms of progress? More phase one, two or three. What do you guys see the distribution? I think it's phase one and two. We haven't reached phase three yet. There are some customers who have started looking at phase three, but it's all centered around phase one, phase two. Understand the playbook. Yes. What systems are to start with? Absolutely. Those kinds of things. Yes. Making the culture, making people buy into it. Absolutely. I think it's important that we're reporting here is that cultural shift, this new generation of workers. We alluded to it about the young people coming to the university. There's a generational shift happening. Absolutely. It's almost pride. You see the sparkle in the entrepreneur's eyes. They're like, there's a whole nother thinking out there. How do you guys relate to that? What's your observations being that we're the older mature generation kind of looking back at the young guns coming up? I think it worked very well for us. We went for a combined strategy. We come from a strong lineage of system integration and application delivery, and we had a lot of people who were very much tuned to offering turnkey solutions. So I worked first on them, because I wanted to have those mindsets with huge amount of experience, ready in the new era of doing business. At the same time, we started getting the new team from whom we started learning. Many things in cloud, many things in terms of automation. We are learning more from them. So this way, I think we had the initial success. I think we continue in our strategy. You bring in combined Montines. They can learn from each other. The key is learning two ways. I think the younger generation does not carry baggages, unlike the older generation. They're more open. They're more agile to learning new technology, and they want to be entrepreneurs developing applications that create opportunity for the community, for businesses, and for themselves. Yeah, I mean, we had a startup on here, a 13-year-old company doing APIs, billions of transactions, API calls. That wasn't even possible in the old days. Maybe we had a security perimeter, firewalls, everything's locked down. Now, anymore. It's all open. The surface area is completely... Entirely new dimension. Yeah, security is huge. Thanks so much, guys, for coming on theCUBE. Take a quick minute, each of you, to give a plug for your companies, what you guys are working on, key initiatives you'd like to share. We'll start over here. Thank you, John. My company, Computer World, focuses on digital transformation. We help businesses thrive on new areas by building innovations. My company, Almirth Computers Middle East, we are a four-decade-old company, and we have taken our rebirth recently in the cloud era, focusing more on cloud now, whatever we do, it's all focused on cloud, and we are on to managed services, we are on to the emerging technologies, RPA, AI, machine learning. Yeah, the bots are coming. This is going to help humans. The big debate about automating jobs away, kind of like, I always laugh at that because there's so many job openings. Very true. Very true. Some go away, but more are born. This is the dynamic. Yep. Guys, thanks so much for coming on, sharing your insights, appreciate it. Cube coverage here at Bahrain 4, AWS Summit. I'm John Furrier, we're back with more Cube coverage after this short break.