 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. We're virtual this year, we're not in person, we have to do it remote, but theCUBE is virtual and I'm John Furrier, your host here with CUBE Virtual Next Guest, Sarah Cooper, who's the general manager of the IoT solutions with AWS, Sarah, great to see you. Saw you last year in person in real life, now we're remote, but thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks, John, always good to be on theCUBE and great to see you again. I don't know how many years it's been from our initial meeting, but it's been a few. Well, we got a CUBE search engine. You were on in 2016, but we saw each other last year and when we were riffing on the IoT news, a lot of great stuff. I mean, from speed racer all the way down through all the industrial stuff, even more this year. But two things that jumped out at me this year was the carrier keynote and also the BlackBerry, kind of the automotive thing. Again, speaks to kind of two megatrends. Obviously the automotive will get to the second, but the carrier announcement was really interesting. You guys did this thing and I was so impressed with the cold chain product. It was the connected cold chain, it was called. This is where the carrier, which is known for air conditioning. This is critical IoT devices that say, well, the vaccines involved, take a minute to explain what the cold chain, connected cold chain project was. Yeah, absolutely. So we worked closely and are working closely with Carrier on a product called Lynx. Now, cold chain, as Dave Gitlin, the CEO of Carrier described in Andy's keynote, is about moving perishable goods, things that need certain temperature ranges from point A to point B. And that usually, that sounds simple. That's not quite so simple. It's usually at least five to 25 hop, sometimes as much as 40. And these are perishable goods. This is food, this is medicines, this is vaccines, very hot topic at the moment. And today, you're moving between ships and those big tractor trailers, and you've got warehouses with refrigeration units, and you've got retail grocery stores with refrigeration units. These are all different data sources that are owned by different members of that supply chain, that value chain end to end. And so what Lynx does is it pulls the data from all of the carrier equipment and then pulls that data and looks across all of this information using things like machine learning to draw inference and relationship. And then allows us to be able to make smart recommendations on things like routes or if a particular produce might need to stop before its original vent to make sure it's got long shelf life, it allows us basically to provide that transparency end to end, which is so difficult because of the number of players. And it's in part due to Kira's breadth of products. And then with AWS, we're bringing the digital technology side. We got the IoT, the ML, a lot of the big data, processing pieces. So we're really excited about that. And I have to say, it's one of the easiest projects to hire for when you talk about making sure that we're able to reduce food waste from the current 30 to 40% or that we're working on making sure that vaccines are efficacious by the time that they get to a vaccination site, engineers sign up pretty quickly. You know, the cliche, you know, mission-driven companies are always kind of like, oh, people love to work for mission-driven companies. In this case, you have a project and group that literally is changing the world. If you think about just the life savings on the vaccine side, that's obvious. We all can relate to that now with COVID on full display. But just in terms of energy consumption, on food waste to perishables, if you look at the costs involved to society, hunger around the world, just food is just wasted and there are people starving, right? So when you start looking at this as an instrumentation problem, right, it gets really interesting. So you mentioned supply chain, value chain. This is IoT, potentially even blockchain. Again, this is a key change the world area. You guys have a multi-year deal with Carrier, so validation. What does that mean specifically? You guys are going to provide cloud services. What's that all mean? Yeah, so we're bringing our engineering talent as is Carrier. This is a co-development. So we're actually jointly developing together. They bring a lot of the domain expertise. They bring years and years of experience in refrigeration and in track and trace of these products. And we bring engineers who have vast experience at scale in these kinds of inference challenges and data management and data quality. And so it's really kind of bringing the best of both worlds. And you see this happening more and more, I think, in general where you've got a company like AWS that has strong digital expertise and a history of product innovation working with customers that are very innovative themselves but typically have been innovative in traditional hardware products and the two worlds coming together to make sure that we can really solve some of the big challenges that are facing our society today. And again, it's great to wake up in the morning and get to work on a project that has that kind of impact. Well, before we move on to the whole BlackBerry automotive thing, which is another whole fascinating thing, share something that people might not know about this carrier project that's important, whether it's something anecdotal, something that you know, that's important. What else is there that's game changing that you think is important to point out? Yeah, I don't know that when we first started working with Carrier on scoping this project that I had really thought through all the different players that are touched by full chain. Certainly we've got a number of them within Amazon with our fulfillment technologies and our grocery stores, that's logical. You think about the shippers and people who are out farming and I mean, crab meat is something that moves in these big refrigerated containers but actually there are transportation companies, there's drivers of these big rigs that need to make sure that they have fuel consumption management. You've got customers really kind of throughout that piece, freight forwarders and so really the breadth of the people that are touched not just you and I as consumers of perishable goods and fruits and produce and medicines but also really that full end to end ecosystem. And that's both the exciting part from a business standpoint but also the exciting part from a technology standpoint. Well, it's great work and I applaud you for it's one of those things where food waste isn't just a supply chain impacts the rest of the world because you're more efficient, you can distribute food to other places where people are hungry and its overall impact is a huge trickle effect so impact is huge. Okay, now let's talk about the automotive piece because last year we had on theCUBE folks from BlackBerry and I remember them came on like BlackBerry, isn't that the phone that went extinct by the iPhone? No, no, there's a whole nother IoT automotive thing around IVY, intelligent vehicle data platform. You guys just announced a multi-year agreement with them to develop that product combined with some of the IoT and machine learning. Could you take a minute to explain what this relationship is, what does it mean and what does it mean for the industry? Yeah, it's similar to the carrier relationship. You know, we are engineering together. In this instance, QNX, which is Division of BlackBerry is in 175 million vehicles. I mean, just think about that. They're running under the covers and they are a safety security layer and a real-time operating system. So, you know, when you think about all of the products really end to end and QNX isn't just an automotive, it's in nuclear power plants, it's in manufacturing automation. It's one of those products that you're probably benefit from but you didn't know it. And in the automotive space, it's the piece that manages the safety certified layers of data coming off of sensors in the car. And so fundamentally, what we're doing with IVY is we're up-leveling that information. Today, if you think about a car, you've got 1500 suppliers that are all providing parts into that car, which means that different makes and models have different seat sensors to give you weight in the back seat as an example. And so if you wanna write an application that tries to determine if that weight in the back seat is your dog or not, my dog happens to be bothering me at the moment. I can see, that's great, that was good to have. That's one of the benefits of working at home, you know? Absolutely. So we'll use him as an excuse here. But if you wanna know if that's a dog on the back seat, being able to then figure out the piezoelectric measurements and the algorithms means you have to know what sensors are in that back seat, which means you gotta write essentially an application per sensor manufacturer, per vehicle make and model. That doesn't work. So fundamentally, what IVY does is it abstracts away the differences between the vendors and then it up-levels information by using machine learning and analytics running in the car to be able to allow a developer to say, you know, API, is there a dog in the car? Like, how simple is that? I don't have to figure out what the weight measurement is. I don't know, I have to know if there's cameras in the car or if there's some other way to know if the dog, I just need to ask, is there a dog in the car? And the APIs from IVY will tell you, yes, no, or I don't know, you know? Cause sometimes there isn't the technology to know that. And then the application developer can then use that information to build delightful experiences, things that make your dog behave hopefully, things that might help protect them on a hot day, you know, in things where you know that if there's a child in the car, you don't play explicit lyrics. If they're fighting in the backseat, you make sure that the cartoons go off until they behave themselves and cartoons come back on. There are lots of in-vehicle experiences that can be enabled by this as well as vehicle operations. So, you know, being able to do- Maintenance, maintenance and all that stuff. Yeah, selective recalls, making sure that only cars that are actually affected need to come in and making sure that, you know, that's quantified and that, you know, it is actually safe to drive to the point of recall. All of that can be done on a vehicle-by-vehicle basis. So are you competing with car companies now? No, fundamentally the OEMs are the companies that the car manufacturers are those that end up delivering this capability and they own the data. You know, this isn't something where BlackBerry or AWS owns the data, the auto manufacturers do. So it's their platforms to make a delightful experience out of. We're just helping to make sure that that's as easy as possible and opening up, you know, the potential innovation so that it's, you know, it's certainly their developers internally, but if they want to take advantage of the millions of AWS developers, now they can do that. Sarah, great to have you on. One of the things I just want to final question or final point, let's get your reaction to is that it seems to me with the cloud in this post COVID scale error when you start to get into edge, you know, industrial, IoT, you hear things like instrumentation, supply chain, these are buzzwords, these are kind of characteristics, all kind of in play. But the other observation is partnerships are more co-engineering, co-development vibe. Is that just unique to what you're doing or do you see this as kind of as a template for partnering? Because when you start to get these abstraction layers, the heavy lifting can be under the covers. You have this enablement model, what's your quick take on this? Yeah, I think we talk about undifferentiated heavy lifting a lot at Amazon. And fundamentally that's different for each industry. Andy talked about that in his keynote. And so I think, you know, you'll see more and more co-development and co-engineering coming from companies across, we have big technical challenges and these are complex problems to solve. It takes a village. Yeah, awesome. Sarah Cooper, thanks for coming on GM of IoT Solutions, AWS, two great success stories, the carrier and BlackBerry, one automotive with BlackBerry's operating system that powers the safety in for cars and hopefully future application development and carrier with the cold connected chain, delivering perishable goods, vaccines and food, changing the game. That's the game changer. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, John. Appreciate it. Always good to see you. Okay, keep coverage. I'm John Furrier, host. David, there's more coverage throughout the day and all the next couple of weeks. Thanks for watching.