 Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back. We're here live in Washington D.C., it's theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit, Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit. It's like reinvent, but also for public sector. But it's a global public sector. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Vincent Qua, who's the head of education, non-profits and healthcare in Asia Pacific and Japan for AWS. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks John, Stu. Great to be able to be here. You know, we constantly talk about cloud in the United States here and people use the word gov cloud. And Theresa and I always kind of like jokingly say, no, it's bigger than gov cloud. It's global public sector. And you bring an international perspective covering APAC for AWS? Yes, absolutely. It's public sector, okay? Outside of China, which is a different division of Amazon, you get the whole world. So Theresa and the team are looking not just to the US, it's the entire world. What's different? How does that, how's it working? Give us an update. Well, I think one of the key differences that we see is that US has really led the way in terms of the adoption of cloud technologies. We have great examples of universities that have really gone all in. What we are seeing now is that universities and education institutions in Asia are beginning to pick up that pace and it's exciting to see some of the universities really coming very strongly using AWS. And we're seeing this across, not just in mature countries and developed countries, but also in developing countries. And so it is a very widespread adoption of the cloud. And we're very excited by that. Tell us about the AWS Educate. Theresa Carlson on stage yesterday very highlighted much in her keynote about education as well as some of the work that you're doing with retraining and educating young people and whatnot. But really education has been a real growth area from interest with cloud. Because old IT, you look at that, it's okay. They've never had a lot of IT guys. But it's really changed both technology procurement and delivery, but also the impact. Talk about the AWS Educate program. Yeah, so the AWS Educate program is a free program that all institutions can join. It comes with content from AWS. It comes with content from some of the top computer science universities in the world, as well as cloud credits, where individual student members or the educators members, they can actually get access to using the real platform that AWS provide. Now this is really game changing for students and for the institution. And it's game changing because they have exactly the same access to all the 125 plus technologies that AWS provide to enterprises. And now they are in the hands of students. So can you imagine if they have the experience using some of these services, building capabilities, building solutions and services and bringing it out to the market? That's right. So now innovation is in the hands of every single individual. And Educate is such an important program to re-skill and skill graduates to be ready for the working world. Yeah, I love that, Vincent. I think back most of my career, when you talked about education, talked about like research in universities. So it was a certain top tier and a very limited amount. You're really democratizing what's happening. Wonder if you have any examples or what sort of innovations are coming out of some of these global initiatives? One of the great example is NOVA, right? So we've announced that NOVA is now building this cloud associate degree as part of their information systems technology. What's NOVA again? The Northern Virginia Community College. It was in the keynote yesterday. It's in the keynote. Not to be confused with Villanova, the basketball champs. Northern Virginia. Okay, go ahead, sorry. So there's a need there that the institutions see because there's so much that the industry would need in terms of skills. And graduates graduating with the right skill set. If you look at the World Economic Forum that was published in 2016, mobile internet and cloud computing are the two key technological drivers that's creating all these change in the industry. And many, many organizations are now investing into skilling and reskilling. Educate sits so nicely into this particular part of the agenda. Apart from what NOVA has done here in the US, there are two other examples I want to quickly highlight to you. The first is in the first week of June, we actually did an event in the Philippines. And it was a large-scale student event. We had more than hundreds of students in a single location with probably close to a hundred educators. We took them through a four-day event. Two days of skills and content learning with hands-on experience. A third day on a gamified challenge that we put the students through so that they can compete with one another in groups and thereby achieving top-notch scores in the leaderboard. And at the end of the day, they actually get to also develop a curriculum vitae, a CV that they can actually submit to companies. And on a fourth day, we brought more than 20 companies as part of this whole event. And we got the students to actually connect with the companies and the companies to the students so that where the companies are looking for jobs, these are the students that are ready with skills that they have learned over the past three days that they can apply to jobs that these companies are looking for. So that's a really strong case of what we see working and connecting skills to companies that are looking for students with the right set of skills. Talk about the international global landscape for a minute. Can you have a unique perspective in your job? What are the key things going on out there? What's the progress look like? What are some of the successes? Can you share a little bit about what's going on in Asia Pacific and Japan? Sure, there'll be two examples that I'll be sharing. The first is we know that AWS Educate started off at the tertiary level, but then last reinvent is now being extended to 14 years and above. And so now children at that age can learn about the cloud and be made aware of what's the potential of the cloud and what they can learn and use the cloud for. We've also begun to extend that work into the adult working workforce. So one very specific example that I can share with you, there is an organization in Singapore called the National Trade Union's Congress Learning Hub. They're an education service provider and they provide education services to citizens of Singapore. We have worked with them. They're using the AWS Educate content and they developed two causes, fundamentals in cloud computing and fundamentals in IoT. They've ran these pilot causes for the fundamentals in IoT to a group of individuals age 45 to 74 years old. And they came away, the course just simply blew their mind away. I mean, they were so excited about what they have learned, how to program actually I have with me an internet of things button. Now they can actually come out with an idea, program an activity on this button so that it trigger off a particular reaction. And that's the excitement that these individuals 45 to 74 years old, they have the domain expertise. Now they need is just an idea and a platform. And it's also entrepreneurial too. Absolutely. They can tinker with the software, learn about the cloud at a very young age and they can grow into it and maybe start something compelling, have a unique idea, fresh perspective. Correct. Someone who's retraining to get a new job. Correct. And innovation is, we keep thinking of innovation as something that's really big but actually innovation doesn't have to be that way. It can start very small and then scale up from there. And all you need is just an idea to apply. All right, so Vincent, one of the themes we've been talking a lot about at the show is cybersecurity. Can you speak to how that discussion plays specifically in the education markets? What we want to do is really raise the awareness of every individual's understanding of cloud computing. And by that, I mean from 14 years to 74 years old. We want to let them know, actually they are already interacting with cloud technologies. For example, if you have a Samsung Smart TV at home, if you have made a hotel booking through Expedia or through Airbnb, or you have called for home delivery from McDonald's, you've already interacted with the cloud. And so what we want to do is make sure that everybody actually understand that. And then through some of these causes that are being provided by our partners, then they can go and learn about the security part of it and help them have a much better sense of an idea of, look, the cloud is actually a lot more secure and we've heard many examples of that today and yesterday. And we want to give them that assurance that what they are doing and consuming, they can be part of that entrepreneur process to create something new and very exciting. Vincent, I'll give you the last word on this interview by sharing the update from Asia Pacific AWS. What's, how many people are out there? Is it growing, you're hiring? What are some of the priorities you guys have? They have a big event in Singapore. I know that we've been watching and thinking about bringing theCUBE there, but give us some idea of the growth and around with AWS people. What's the headcount look like? What's, give us some estimations. Well John, you know I can't really talk too much about headcount, but I can say that we are definitely growing our AWS headcount very, very rapidly. The needs and requirements out there in the market is so tremendous and we want to be able to serve the customer as best as we can. I mean, we are a customer obsessed company and so we want to be there with a customer, work with them to really meet the objective and the goals that they have and help them achieve that vision. And so we are just the enabler, but we empower the customer to thank you. You have events out there too, right? You have the re-invent, I mean summit. We have the AWS summit and this coming October, we have the public sector summit here in Singapore, as well as in Canberra in September. Great. And there's an education event coming domestically too. And there's an education, a global education event that is happening in Seattle in August. So we're very excited about that. Lot of action on the AWS ecosystem. Congratulations, you guys do a great job. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, Vince. I really appreciate it. Hey, we're here live in Washington, DC. This is theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We have Dave Vellante here as well coming and joining us for some interviews. We'll be right back. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break.