 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hi, and welcome to a special production of theCUBE. We're talking to the Amazon Web Services Public Sector, their partner awards program, I'm your host, Stu Miniman. And we're digging in on education. It's one of the sectors, of course, public sector looks at nonprofits, looks at the government sectors and education. And of course, when we talk about remote learning is such a huge important topic, especially right now in 2020 with the global pandemic. So happy to welcome to the program. We have two guests. First of all, we're representing the award-winning company Mohamed Hawke. He is the co-founder and senior vice president of architecture and engineering with E-Lumen. And joining is one of his customers, Damien Doyle, who is the associate vice president of enterprise infrastructure solutions at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County or UMBC as it's known. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, thanks for having us. All right, first of all, Mohamed, congratulations, as I said in my intro, such an important topic. I have two children that are dealing with remote learning. I have lots of friends that work in higher education and know in the technology space. So your company is the 2020 AWS Public Sector award winner for best remote learning. I'm sure there is a space that has a lot of competition and of course, leveraging public cloud is a great way to be able to ramp this sort of thing up rather fast. Give us a little bit, you know, you are the co-founder so would love to hear a little bit of the origin story, your background and tell us about what differentiated the E-Lumen. Sure, E-Lumen, we provide managed products and services around end user compute with a focus on education for providing access to applications and other technology resources, course content, course applications in the public cloud so that users are able to use whatever device they have wherever they are and have access to those applications that are required for completing that coursework. They can be in, you know, at home, in their dorms, at a corner coffee shop on the side of a mountain in the Middle East, wherever they may be, but leveling that playing field so that they can have access to any of the demanding applications on any device is what our goal is, is to make sure that we're not having technology be a barrier to their learning. Fantastic. Damian, if we could turn to you then at UMBC, maybe if you could give our audience a thumbnail of the university and I have some idea of the challenge that was put in front of you when you talk about E-Learning, but maybe you could give us a little bit of the pre-COVID and what you were faced and what you were looking at when it came to dealing with the current situation. Sure, be happy to. So UMBC is a mid-sized public institution. We're sort of suburban, about 14,000 students and we have undergrad, graduate and doctoral programs and we have a heavy focus on a lot of the STEM disciplines. And so pre-COVID, very based in collaborative environments, active learning, but hands-on. So a lot of our programs really do have a lot of that and we leverage technology very heavily, even if it's in, whether it's in engineering, biology, any of those kinds of programs. As you said, the challenge became how do you very quickly pivot into an entirely online model when you sort of scattershot all of your students and you don't really have a great sense of what they're gonna have access to and the abilities and connectivity they're gonna have. So this kind of thing was really critical for us as we made that transition. Excellent. Mohamed, were you working with UMBC before the current move to go remote, give us a little bit about the relationship and how that started? I believe actually that the pandemic was the impetus to kind of drive this forward. Damien and his team reached out to Illumin looking for a solution that would allow them to kind of have students access the applications that they would normally would have access to in their physical computer labs, but with the change and not having to access to those labs anymore, needed a remote learning solution, a remote access solution for being able to access those, high compute, high graphics, memory-intensive applications through the cloud, taking into account the fact that students won't have the highest end computer laptop. They'll probably be working on a Chromebook or a lower end machine, but need that compute power. And then we had to kind of provide a solution pretty quickly because it was, schools were shutting down essentially, physically shutting down and needing to continue on with their coursework. Yeah, Damien, I'd like to understand from your side, can you share with us a little bit the timeframes? How fast did you go from, oh my gosh, we need this, we need proposals, we need to roll this out, and we need to have students and teachers back up and running? Well, I think the one thing from our side, we had already known of Illumin and we had been looking at that pre-COVID. We knew we needed a product that provided us this kind of agility and really gave the students some better access to the computing tools that they needed. So once we identified that, the thing that was amazing to me is, is we moved from our existing system over to production, Illumin in, it was about two and a half weeks sort of start to finish. And to get all the images, to get all the technology running, tested and everything up and running in two and a half weeks for a full solution for a campus is was pretty amazing. And that was one of the real benefits we saw as going to the cloud. We also looked at this outside of COVID as something that really provided a major benefit to the students so that they could work from anywhere at any time, rather than be sort of tethered to that physical lab. Well, I'm glad you raised that. So if you could Damien a little bit, help us understand, how much are you using cloud before? And it sounds like you believe that, in the, I guess if we say post COVID world, you will probably have some hybrid model, would that be fair to say? Yeah, I think before we did have a different solution that was still cloud based, it was part of our business continuity. So we still had some semblance of a virtual computing solution in the cloud, but it wasn't that extensive. And a lot of our individual programs, chemical engineering, geography and others were using physical labs that the students would sort of schedule times and be able to work in as part of their coursework. Coming out of this, we fully expect if we're going an extended period of time where students are able to access these materials and these demanding software packages at any time from any kind of device, coming out of COVID, they're not gonna wanna go back to that model where they're asked, they have to get permission and go in in limited hours into a physical lab and sit there. This is going to be the expectation going forward, is that they have this kind of access and this kind of flexibility from now on. Yeah, this is, I mean, they've gotten a taste essentially and so, they see how easy it is to complete their coursework without actually having to trek across campus into a lab and kind of fight with the population to find a seat. This basically will become an expectation of an offering. Yeah, Mohammed, what I'd love if you could drill in a little bit for us there. Architecturally speaking, of course the cloud is built to be able to scale and move fast. So if you need capacity and need to scale up fast, that's great. If in the future you still wanna leverage this solution but you can scale down, that should be possible. So maybe give us a little bit of how AWS architecturally supports what you're doing and just from a pricing solution standpoint, how you'll be able to support the customer in today's environment and however that path goes down the road, you'll be able to support that too. Right, I mean, so with the AWS cloud, we're able to, as you said, scale up or down as demand is needed, but we've taken that even a little bit further where we're scaling based off of student scheduling. So if we've got a course that we know that is running from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m., prior to that course starting, we'll scale the environment up so that it's available for those students if it's more of an in-course lab session and then spin things back down after the course is done so that we don't have those many, many machines sitting there running and burning the hours and running up the bill. Physical environment, once you've installed it, it's there, it's always running, you cannot do that, but with the power of the cloud, we're able to go up and down. We're able to take things, scale things down off hours if we look at the patterns for student usage, off hours, overnight, take things down because you don't need those machines sitting there running all the time. And this is one of the biggest differentiators. So many times in higher ed, we struggle to have to explain to companies and vendors and providers what our needs are and how we're very different from corporations and other verticals. With the Lumen solution and the capabilities in AWS, we're really having this tailor to our student schedules, to the class schedules, and that kind of flexibility makes the product economically viable for us, but it also means that we don't get nearly the kind of pushback from the academic side because it is really tailored to meet their needs versus just something we're kind of shoehorning in. So that makes a huge difference in terms of adoption and the way it's perceived from a marketing and acceptance standpoint. Yeah, Damian, I'm curious, once you did that initial rollout, how much of an on-ramp is there for both the education, the educator side as well as the student side, and you talked about having some flexibility as to how and when students use things, that sounds great, but do you have to change office hours or the hours that the staff are leveraging that? I'm just trying to understand the ripple effect of what you're doing. No, it's a fair point. We have done fairly extensive training. The students picked it up very quickly. What we, with students, if there's a tool that they can use to do their work more effectively, they're going to use it, whether it's something we provide or something they find through other means. But what we've done is reached out to all of our faculty that were training, that were teaching in our physical labs and tried to work with them to understand what this solution is, how they can sort of rethink some of their classes and a couple of our departments have actually taken an approach of rather than sit everybody in a virtual lab the same way they would sit people in a physical lab, they're moving some of this to more asynchronous so that the students can sort of work at their own pace and sort of rethink how they structure some of those classes because of the flexibility being provided. But it does take a lot of training from the instructional side and some rethinking of this. But the end solution is something that reaches the students where they are and the way they want to learn which is a really powerful thing we're always trying to do. Excellent. Mohamed, I'm wondering just broadly learnings that you have from what's been happening. Obviously, I'm sure you've been quite busy in responding to things. What's been the impact on your business? How has AWS been as a partner to be able to support the needs of what you're doing? Well, as you can imagine, things have just really blown up in terms of demand and being able to, again, through the power of the cloud just being able to scale up and rapid deployment. As we spoke about earlier, this deployment was two and a half weeks from start to finish. Being able to do that with AWS tools have been critical in moving things forward. Excellent. Damien, it's back to you on this. Obviously, if you had had more time to be able to plan this out, there might be some things that you would do differently. But what have your learnings been with this? And if you've been talking to your peers, any advice that you would give as you've moved through this rapid acceleration of the move to remote? Certainly, I think we would have certainly done some things differently, but we had been talking about this move for three or four months ahead of COVID. So for us, it wasn't quite as rushed as the actual deployment wound up being. I think the big thing is having a vendor and having a partner where you can understand all the options. So the good and bad of the cloud is there's a hundred different ways to do almost anything you want to accomplish and taking the time to understand what the different features and the ramifications of how you deploy and how you think through that. For us, we deployed one way because we could do it very quickly. And then we took the rest of the semester and part of the summer to do some more thorough evaluations to really ask our constituents, do you like this method or do you like some of the other possibilities and see which user experience they liked more? And then we're able to work with Illumin and they've been able to be very nimble in adjusting the services to meet what we've gotten our feedback on. So I think if I had to do it again, I would have done that testing ahead of time, but that's a very minor thing. These are really sort of small tweaks to just make life a little easier, not fundamental differences in what we're providing. Yeah, Damien, one last question if I could. Sorry, Mohamed, just I'm curious from the financial standpoint, how much you felt that you understood what costs would be and some of the levers as to what you were using and the impact there. We've seen great maturation over the last handful of years as to transparency and understanding how cloud actually is billed. But just curious if you have any final comments on the financial piece of things, seeing that it probably wasn't something that was in your budget for the last quarter. It wasn't, that's very true, but we also knew that it was essential. So what we realized was we didn't know how often a lot of our physical labs and these classes were being used. So we knew there was going to be some unknowns. We'd move to this, we'd have to see what adoption was, but being able to get the reporting out and working with Mohamed and others to really start customizing in the cloud, that's the beauty of it is we recognize, we saw some really fascinating patterns where during the week people would use this sort of as you'd expect, but on the weekends, it was in the evenings. Nobody's logging on Saturday or Sunday morning, but boy at eight PM, there's a good bit of usage. So we could tailor and do some of that off hours work and really slows things down. Having that visibility has made the economic piece much more viable and really being able to tweak the computing power with two different needs of the different classes. So it's actually been fairly easy to understand, but it was a ramp up where we had to sort of guess it first and then understand our own processes, but that's more sort of the, if you don't have good data coming in, it's hard to get it out. Excellent, Mohamed, I want to let you kind of give your lessons learned. Obviously it's a technology space you've been in and it's just been an acceleration of some of the things you're working on. So lessons learned, advice you would give to other companies, other universities in education, no facilities out there. Right, and this is again speaking to the power of the cloud, some of the biggest lessons learned here is you don't necessarily need to get it right the first time. As Damian was saying, we went back, kind of analyzed what we were seeing and after the initial deployment, took a look at the actual usage and kind of adjusted based off of that, according to that, taking in feedback from faculty members on how they were using the system and tweaking the presentation or tweaking applications on the backend for accommodating those needs. That's the power of the cloud, being able to adjust on the fly. You're not, you don't have to be committed to every single bit there and being able to change it on the fly is just something that is kind of natural in the cloud these days. Excellent. Well, thank you both so much for joining us. Damian, thank you for joining and moving forward, sharing your story. Wish you the best of luck going forward and Mohammed, big congratulations on winning super important category, especially here in 2020. Congratulations to you and the team. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. All right, stay tuned for more coverage here from the AWS Public Sector. It's their partner awards program. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.