 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit Online Virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Here in our Palo Alto studios, we're quarantined with our crew here. We're talking to all the guests, getting all the content. I'm excited to have Sandy Carter. CUBE alumni is also the VP, Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector, Partners and Programs. Sandy, great to see you virtually. You look great. Great to see you virtually too. It's great to see everybody virtually. I love the sign behind you powered by AWS. I'm excited to have you on, but I really wanted to get jumped right in because this is really an important conversation. Public Sector is seeing a lot of activity around what's going on with COVID-19, especially with all the public services that are needed and people are now remote workers, remote consumers, public service, and still needs to be delivered just like business. So it's a really had a big impact to the entire world. We're all seeing it. We're feeling it. It's not just a tech thing. How are you seeing your community respond? Your partners are responding to COVID-19. Can you share what's happening? Yes, John, I have to say, I am so incredibly proud of the partners that we support and how they've stepped up in this time that has no blueprint, right? It's brand new for everybody. Whether we're talking about virtual call centers, we had so many states that said they had people waiting for hours, waiting for calls to be answered about COVID, for take for instance, West Virginia. West Virginia had callers waiting for hours, 77,000 calls a day. They worked with one of our partners, Smartronix, and they got this new solution, a remote virtual call center, up in 72 hours. 72 hours later, average wait time was 60 seconds. Amazing job by Smartronix. Or one of our other partners, Electronic Caregiver, who's based out of New Mexico, where my husband's from, a great partner who's been looking at telemedicine, how they can help those at risk in hospitals and rehabs, even just at their homes. Or another startup that's a partner of ours called Hello Alice that integrated with our AI and ML to create a small business platform to help those small businesses get access to funding, answer questions during this really hard time. And the last example I'll give you is Intervision, one of our newest premier partners who had a customer that came to them and said, look, I need to get a remote work solution up, workspaces, identity manager, help desk. And they thought it would take months and Intervision was able to do it in weeks. So I am so proud and so thankful of our partners and what they've done to really impact the world, not just for their own profit, but for purpose, helping out states, governments and citizens. And congratulations, and it's well needed. People are feeling the pain. One area I want to get your thoughts on is the agencies. We talked to the department of defense, general manager earlier today, all the agencies in public sector are shifting. And obviously with the limitations, they got a shift to the remote workforce. They got to be faster, they got to be agile. I know they've been trying to, but they can't just wait any longer, they're forced to. How are your public sector partners helping the agencies? Yeah, this is another just terrific story. I cannot brag about our partners enough with our agency work. So if you looked at all the agencies, kind of had a tight tidal wave of this digital transformation, things that were going to take them years, ended up taking them weeks and months. So whether it's Kansas with the department of labor, they had 87,000 calls a day, 21 staff couldn't do it, worked with our partners to get a call center up and going. Or in New Mexico, again, with Accenture, they used Amazon Connect, which is one of my new favorite products from Amazon. It's a call center that leverages machine learning and AI. They were able to work with the New Mexico Human Services and get that up and going in two days. Or even in Montana, a great story with Deloitte, where they built a custom chat box in seven days, to answer questions about food and medicine and even how to get cash if you needed to get cash. Our partners really stepped up with the agencies and they did so much compelling work so quickly. I think speed was such a great component here, John. The speed of deployment, the speed of help. Working 24 by seven to deliver these solutions, our partners really did an amazing job. Yeah, and it's really hard, we're virtual. I wish I was in person with everyone because coming to the Public Sector Sum is one of my favorite events, re-invent and Public Sector Sum of the two big shows that I really think encapsulate all the activity. Because it's virtual, people might miss some news. What else is going on in the world of Public Sector Partners? Can you elaborate more on what's going on around the edges? What's on the bleeding cutting edge? What's the pioneer? And what are some of the blocking and tackling that you're doing? Share some of the news. What else is going on? Yeah, thank you, John. There was so much going on, first of all. We just introduced a new partner solution portal. So all of these COVID-19 solutions are featured there. We will provide a URL for any customer looking for a great solution by our partners. We also really honed in and helped our partners during this time around FedRAMP. And you know that FedRAMP is so crucial. Cybersecurity, incredibly essential during this time. I know you talked to my good friend Casey from Salesforce. They were able to achieve their FedRAMP pie. And we offer a lot of help to our partners to help them to achieve not just FedRAMP, but GDPR as well as HIPAA2. Some other news on migrations. We've got a competency around migrations. We've got some new funding for our partners around MAP. And we're seeing our migrations really accelerate. You know, once these agencies, once these states see the power of the cloud, they're like, give me more, I want to put more. And so we're seeing migrations accelerate. I know that you saw the Navy speak about what they're doing with SAP NS2, another one of my favorite partners, 72,000 users now running NS2 on AWS, six different commands, pretty powerful. And I would say last but not least is PTP, our program transformation program for our partners, which really is like a 110 day session to help the partners become a cloud business themselves. So they're kind of drinking their own champagne before they go out and help others, they become a cloud business. It's really powerful. This program has helped to generate twice the revenue of a typical APN program. You know, you mentioned the Navy, I was having an interesting chat about that and the migration was less than 10 months. Yes, again, speed, speed, speed, right, John? I mean, it's incredible. Years to months. And the other thing that you brought up that I find interesting, and this is something that's kind of not talked about, but it's felt, just the basic stuff, like getting paperwork in, some of these processes, like you mentioned FedRAMP, there's a lot of things that go on around public sector that you just got to get done. You got to slog through it, if you will. You guys have responded well there. And this is the benefit of the cloud, having these streamlined processes. I'll elaborate more on that, because I think that's an important benefit, not only just solving the critical infrastructure, like call centers and things of that nature, but getting business done, that's a big thing. Yeah, and I would say, you know, if you look at it, we helped over 20 states with their insurance processes. I mean, it seems like a minor thing, but a lot of these things were manual before. We've helped many states with unemployment. You know, very critical at this time, taking a manual process and getting it into the cloud. But there are so many of these that we can go on and on about, how do you get medical supplies? One of our partners, Cohesive, down in Latin America, has been helping around some of the supply chain issues that we deal with there. Some of the things that we take for granted when you're in person, now that you're virtual, you really need to think them through in the cloud. So again, you know, our partners responded with speed. They responded with heart too, John. One of the other things, you know, hashtag techforgood. They responded with heart as well as they were looking at these projects and ensuring that states and agencies and governments around the world could take care of their citizens, which is all of us. You know, it's interesting, we've talked in the past and we've talked on camera and off camera around our shared passion around techforgood. I've been a big proponent of as well as you as a variety of other folks. But with the crisis, the word impact means something and social impact is actually social impact. Getting your unemployment check or, you know, this is highlights the critical nature of why these services exist. And I think it's a real testament. I think people should step back and saying, well, we should never go back to the old antiquated ways because this is now the new reality. These services can be agile. They can be faster. It takes a crisis, unfortunately. And I guess that could be the silver lining and all this. So, you know, props to you guys and having the partnership there with the partners. And to the governments and states, John, who have now, like they move rapidly, right? All these states, all these agencies, all these governments move quickly to digital transformation. Now they've gotten a taste of it and they're like, give me more. And so the great thing to me is that this wasn't a one-time event or a one-time crisis-driven movement. Now that they see the power of it, much like what you're seeing with your business, they're doing more. And that's what I really applaud for all of them and the way that they're transforming the businesses now longer-term. I'm optimistic and I hope when we come out of this, when everyone gets settled and they reimagine and reinvent, there's a growth strategy and the expansion could be for positive change. So, we're all for that and we'll be watching that and reporting on it. I want to ask you something I've heard that you guys will be soon expanding your public safety and disaster response partner competency. Can you tell me more about that? Yeah, so we announced, and this is a hard one, it's disaster response and public safety competency at re-invent for our consulting partners. And that went over amazingly well. I mean, take for instance, Maxar, who is probably the best at delivering data, both pre and post data to a disaster. They helped NOAA, for instance, where data was taking 100 minutes to get that data down, not good enough in a disaster. They were able to achieve a 58% faster download of data so you can do something with it, use that data to make good decisions. So these consulting partners have really embraced our disaster recovery and public safety response competency. And now what we want to do is introduce this for our technology partners. So we're announcing the coming of this program for our technology partners. Now, who is a technology partner? Well, think about an ISV or a SAS provider, these type of partners who have great solutions that target this particular area. Think about public safety right now and how important that is, or even disaster response. You know, we have COVID, but right after that we have all these hurricanes and earthquakes and other things that are happening around the world, killer hornets. And so we've got some great technology partners that have solutions here and we'll be welcoming them into this competency fold as well. Well, this brings up something that I've been commenting on and I want to get your reaction is because, you know, when you have that flywheel pattern, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and SAS, that build cloud and we've seen the benefits over a decade plus. When you bring the business model, you're starting to see the same thing. Some foundational things like infrastructure as a service would be like compliance, instant auditing that the Navy's seeing, for instance, I heard earlier. And then that platform features to allow these new workloads. So these new applications are going to be coming on a creative surge of application developers, new kinds of workloads, new kinds of workforces and workflows. So you're going to start to see these new apps. So that means you guys will probably be inundated with new things. How do people get involved? Do they join APN? What are some of the benefits? What should someone do? I want to be a partner of AWS because I see a solution, I create something that's maybe unique and specialized and niche, but it solves a really important problem. I want to bring it to Amazon. How do I do that? And we want you as a partner too, John, that's for sure. We'll be in there. So yes, I mean, if you're a partner, the very first place to start is to join our APN, our Amazon Partner Network. If you're a startup or an ISV, a distributor, a reseller, a consulting partner, any of those, that would be the first place to start. And then based on what you're interested in, you would then select the types of help that you might get. So for example, if you're a startup, we help startups with credits because a lot of startups need free credits as they're starting their businesses, or even technology. So if you think about hello Alice, really using tagging for her small business site during COVID, we were able to provide some technology expertise to get her moving and grooving. Other great programs that we have out there are things like ATO, the authority to operate. And this is really important, John, because a lot of our customers require FedRAMP. And FedRAMP is very costly, and not only costly, but takes a lot of time. So we can dramatically reduce your time to market with FedRAMP, really help you through with all those best practices. In fact, today we have 110 FedRAMP solution that have gone through our ATO authority to hire, authority to operate process. And that's 4x, our top two competitors combine, 4x, the number of partners that have gotten through because of the amount of time that is reduced through this process, as well as the best practices that we bring. We've done a slimmed down version. So if you're a startup and you're interested in it, like we partner with Joshua down at Capital Factory and they've got the Army Future command, we've got a lot of startups who want it. We've also got a slimmed down version for them as well. Very powerful program. And the best is being in the cloud, you can fast track and learn from others. This is the whole point of cloud. Absolutely, and learning from others is, one of the great things that we love to do. In fact, in July, we're going to do a big partner meeting here at the summit. We'll have partners that participate in the virtual online summit. We're going to do a separate meeting just for our partners in July as well to share with them some of the things that are important to them around programs and some of these APN benefits and some of the changes that we've made to help support them during the COVID crisis. And I think the partners or the channel or wherever you look at it, they're adding value and they're a great partner for Amazon, for you guys. It's a great sibling relationship. Yeah, I mean, we could not, we at Amazon could not do the business we do without our partners. They bring their expertise, their best practices, the skills and the relationships they have, the contracts they bring to the table. So we are so grateful for the partners that we have in our public sector partner program. It's one of the reasons I love my job. Every day I get to talk to a new partner on a new technology area that they're working on. It could be, you know, spatial computing or AI and they're helping not just move for a business, but they're helping on a purposeful mission project usually, which are so powerful in today's world, especially with all the different crises that we've seen. You know, one thing I want to just share with you is I talked to a lot of partners, certainly on theCUBE and in person. One of the things that resonates with partners is not only the optimism of Amazon and the programs you run, but it's the enablement. You guys really enable the partners to be successful. On your behalf and you on their behalf, but ultimately the customer. And I think, and there's money to be made. So it's lucrative, they're profitable, and they can impact change. So this enabling capability is really the magic. And so I want to ask you on your final question here on the talk is what's the vibe now? Because obviously we know it's pretty depressing with COVID and we're going to get through this, but so there will be a day we get through this. There'll be growth and strategies around it. It'll never be the same. Certainly I believe, really hybrid world. What's the vibe inside the Amazon Web Services public sector partner team, the community, the ecosystem? Could you just give some insight into how people are doing and what's the vibe? Yeah, I would say the vibe is hopeful. We all see the difference and the impact that we are making on a daily basis. And because of that, we continue to stretch forward and really move mountains for our customers to help them deliver better services. Our partners are jumping in in all kinds of areas. First of all, for example, they are jumping in on doing hackathons to help with COVID-19. So John, you know, girls in tech, we've got our partners and us as AWS jumping in to hack on different solutions for some of these challenges that are facing there. That's all about hope, hope that we can make a difference. We are jumping in and assisting on remote work and unemployment to provide hope to the teams and the community. So I would say, you know, it's tough for all. In fact, one of my friends describes this as a crisis cake, not one level of a crisis, but multiple levels of the crisis. And I have never been with a more optimistic and positive team in my whole life, one who's willing to do what it takes. And when I see team, I mean, not just my AWS partner team, which is the best of the world, but our world-class partner team as well, who is willing to jump in there and do what it takes to help our customers. Even this weekend, I had a part of my partner team and my partners working to solve a problem for an agency that was, you know, critical and they jumped in on the weekend to make that happen. So I would say, if I could say one word, I would say my partners are hopeful. They are, they're learning, they're curious, they're stepping out into new areas like connect and remote work and remote learning and they're doing things that they never thought was possible based on what's happening today. Critical infrastructure, the critical software services and processes got to be maintained and there's opportunities. So I think it's, you know, heads down with hope and growth, always great to chat with you. And of course, we'll be following and covering your event next month. So I'm looking forward to it, exciting times. Sandy Carter, thank you for joining me today for coverage. Thank you, John. It's always a pleasure to be here on theCUBE. Thank you guys for watching as well. Sandy Carter, Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector, Partners in Program, Distinguished CUBE alumni, had a tough job, great job, at the same time, a lot of opportunities and hope. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. You're watching our coverage, CUBE virtual of Amazon Public Sector Online Summit. Thanks for watching.