 Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its partner ecosystem. Hello everyone, welcome to this Cube here in D.C., Washington D.C., I'm John Furrier with my co-host. For the next two days, John Walls, we will be discussing the government cloud, AWS Public Sector Summit, it's our live coverage on the ground. Obviously as you know, we have been covering, reinvent for multiple, multiple years. It's our inaugural event here in Washington D.C., no better place where there's a lot of change, a lot of action. I mean, the data lakes here are turning into data swamps and we're here to drain the data swamps and get that data to you. I'm John Furrier with John Walls. Again, John, we're kicking off our first inaugural event, not the first event for AWS Public Sector Summit. I think this is their seventh or eighth year doing it. Started as a little, kind of a small little conference, but now the full-on Public Sector Summit has become, I'm calling the reinvent of government, because with health and human services, government agencies, education, now there's a complete changeover from the Obama administration, really started it off by initiating more open government, more access to data. You're starting to see AWS with wins over the past few years with the CIA. The ability to stand up a government cloud now is now a reality and Amazon has done extremely well on their billions and billions of dollars they're doing in profits, they just 50% growth on those kinds of numbers and Amazon's just taken down, market after market in the enterprise now, in the government for a while, just really a case of history, Amazon. Well, and John, you were on top of this. I know we were talking about this earlier, you written this about this three, four years ago and now we're seeing this tectonic shift occur, right, government's starting to say, okay, we can be open to a transformative experience now that we understand it's secure and it's valuable and it helps us provide better services and improve our services. But I think there's still some convincing to be done, right, I mean, there's not a 100% discipleship if you will amongst the government crowd and so opportunities like this, it's got to bring that innovation to bring that entrepreneurialism to the government mindset is it's a good opportunity but how do you get there? How do you make that shift from the corporate side, everybody gets private sector, public sector maybe a little slower, a little more of a foot-tragger? Well, Amazon's roots, I wrote that story as you mentioned three years ago on four, it kind of broke the story on Andy Jassy and AWS Amazon Web Services and he talked about the journey of Amazon Web Services, how it started as a six-page business plan and he talked about their approach. Amazon's approach from day one has always been about building blocks and one of the things that Andy Jassy and the entire team has always been about is about listening to the customer. Jeff Bezos, Ethos within Amazon has always been lower prices and shipping things faster. You apply that to technology, lower prices of technology and faster response times and you mentioned security. Amazon's moved from that developer-centric culture to the enterprise but really three years ago is where you start to see them really start to get really a landscape into the government and get the beach head. They want to kill key deal against IBM and the CIA and that went to court and the judge actually ruled in favor of Amazon saying Amazon has a better product. So that was to me a seminal moment, that was a flash point, that was an inflection point, whatever you want to call it. Since that time they've just been on a tear bringing the Amazon Web Services business model into the government and what that is is really providing an agility, the ability to turn on, compute, stand up, cloud in a way that makes government agencies agile. We all know from looking at the history of the government they are far from being agile. They're slower than molasses to get things done. Usually little stovepipes and thiefdoms and politics. But now when you start to bring in what Obama did in his administration he opened up the government. That means data can now be exposed, data from agencies for developers. So when you start thinking about developer integration into a government environment you start to see potentially innovation happening and you're seeing evidence of that. We're going to talk with Intel about their AI strategy, started by machine learning. We're now bringing technology to the government and public sector for education, health and human services. A variety of public agencies can benefit from having a DevOps mindset. So, so hit, or share with me your perspective then you've got this obviously this treasure trove of an asset in public data, right? That can be used to improve any number of services. At the same time you've got major security concerns, right? Because it's that valuable. So how does that square up? How does that balance out with this crowd here this week? How much of a discussion is there going to be about making sure there's a secure environment, making sure that it's a protected environment, that there's compliance and governance issues that really abound in this? Yeah, there's really three things right now when you talk about federal agencies going to the cloud. One is the centralization of infrastructure governance. With the advent of cloud, the notion of standing something up, compute and resources is easier than ever. And for governments you can now put your credit card down and a little get a prototype going and then have it in production in months, days, weeks, months. The second thing besides centralized infrastructure is really enforcing policy, right? So it's policy compliance. And that is key because now with all the regulations one department has data that's got to be protected. You see this in healthcare, historically, but now in government, same thing. Compliance of those policies. This data can only be touched by these people. And third, automating operations at scale. To me, those are the things that Amazon can bring to the table. And if they can do those three things with their partners, like Fugue, for instance, a startup in the ecosystem and Evidentio, Intel and others and then Amazon, you can essentially roll out developers, develop apps. So the consumption side of the equation, the users, can get new stuff quick. But the table stakes are a lot of that under the hood technology. Centralized governance, enforcing policy compliance around the data and cloud operations at scale, that's really the key. How does it differ from the corporate world? But here's talking about things that are just as important to a brand as they are to HHS or DHS or whomever, right? Everybody has common concerns. Everybody has protection at the top of their mind. Everybody's got compliance and enforcement and all those things and validation, identification, everything applies to public just like it does public as opposed to private. So, I mean, what's the difference? Well, here's my thought on this. And I haven't written about this yet, but here's my thought. And this is kind of where I see it. You saw the consumerization of enterprises as a big wave over the past five years and that's going to be a run for the next 10, 20 years. We are seeing enterprise businesses providing a consumer experience for employees, meaning my iPhone has apps on it. I want an app-like experience and I don't really want to have that specialized device because I work for a company or a certain email account. I just want to be able to do my thing on-premise in the company and then in the wild as a consumer. I should be able to watch some sports, video gaming, whatever I want to do. I should be able to do that on a device and then come to work and have that work fine. That's been going on for about five years. That's got another big horizon of another 10 years plus minimum. So consumerization of enterprise or business. So that's one. What's going on in the government is really being enterprise, the government is being enterprise, meaning it's always been the snail-pace evolution. The old terminals, government employees having phones that look like relics. So there's a perception that in reality that the government just is slow because they're so stuck on these compliance issues, security, all these risk factors really slow down the adoption of government. So consumerization is going to the businesses and now the businesses is going to the government. So you start to see governments really start to act like agile companies. Well, a problem though, or at least I would imagine a challenge in the public space if I'm a government agency is, I've got a different board of directors, right? I have congressional oversight. They have budgetary control. I am year to year and I don't have quarterly board meetings. Sometimes you get stuck in the whole appropriation process. So that in itself is a whole, is a morass. The government's always because a lot of appointees come in but a lot of the people, whether they work in the State Department, down into the different agencies are public servants. They've been in their jobs. 25, 30 years, right? They're normally, they're workers, right? So even though you might have change at the top at the quote, elected official level of the different department and agencies, in general people are trying to do a good thing. So that's why it slows down. So it's a moving train relative to, I don't want to get fired mentality. So everyone's always been concerned with government around leaking data, compliance. Oh my God, something went wrong. So they're very conservative. That's why I'm saying they've been slower than business. So consumers go super fast. Businesses now are going faster because of the consumer trend and now that trend is coming into the government where again, scale, agility, governance all have to be baked. Those building blocks have to be baked and then the goodness for the developers is really where the action is because at the end of the day, there is a developer community out there that could take data from different agencies, say health and human services and take the raw data and create a mashup to say, hey, I'm going to provide some services to the community on where the best place to get medicine or how to optimize Medicare so that the spending could be more efficient. Who should be doing this or that? There's a lot of cases where, with the data being exposed, government innovation really thrives. That's going to come from the developer community and that creativity cannot be realized without exposing the data, without creating a massive amounts of compute and goodness like what Amazon has with their stack. Is there any kind of, I don't want to say clash of culture, but again, as you said, in terms of government, we think about a more methodical approach, right? And that might come with experience too. The worker has maybe been in that position a little bit longer, as opposed to the private sector where you're getting maybe recent college graduates who are coming in with different ideas, different approaches, different mindsets. So how about that mashup? Just in terms of being open to new approaches and being open to new ideas and then having, I think, the confidence to embrace them as opposed to a startup mentality that obviously is very, very different. Well, it's the same kind of trends we see within the DevOps movement. Culturally, it always starts with the organization. At the end of the day, if people have confidence that they're not going to get fired or that the risk of whatever their issues are, whether it's data or certain kind of, you know, enforcement around policies, if that's solved, then you're now in an environment where everything's kind of been encapsulated so then more freedom to do things. So I think that's step number one. I mean, just getting it out there and just think people know that it's reliable and secure and has scale and the elasticity because the beautiful thing about the business model, the cloud is it's very elastic. You buy as you go. It's not a big buy up front and this is where the government actually can save money. So from a taxpayer perspective, the U.S. government can be highly efficient with cloud. So there's an economic impact, not just the technology and privacy and governance issues. You kind of hit on this in your opening comments about Obama and 2.0 and now we have the Trump administration in office. That's provided certainly a change in how business is being done in Washington in a number of ways. I live here. So believe me, we see it on a regular basis but because of that shift in administration in general, how do companies, you know, like Intel and AWS and Riverbed, who we're going to see here from a little bit later on, some other folks, how do they adapt in that environment when the rules of engagement appear to be maybe a bit cloudier right now? Well, I think the thing that folks like Intel, which huge AI focus, they've always been an enabler. So you look at, I look at these companies like Intel or like Amazon itself, Fugue, Riverbed, Druva, these are the kind of companies out there that are creating enabling technologies, meaning you want to enable growth and opportunity and not foreclose the future, right? So that's really the job of most of those companies. And Intel in particular has always been that kind of bellwether innovator. They create technology. We've had Moore's Law that's changed landscape over the years, but they have an AI focus of a 5G network transformation, smart cities, autonomous vehicles. Intel has now a fabric of technology that's taken to the next level and I'll say Intel and AWS work together and things like smart cities. I mean, this is a huge issue. I mean, talk about like, you know, being consumerized. So I mentioned consumerization of IT and business and business now impacting government. When you start getting the consumerization of government, you're talking about Uber, Airbnb, these lifts, autonomous vehicles, who the hell sets the policies for those? There's going to be a governance involved on the societal impact at the smart cities level, meaning that's a government issue. So who determines the policy and risk for the citizen of the community? The cities and towns are going to monitor which side of the street the cars drive on. Are they going to monitor cyber bullying and cybersecurity? They're going to monitor the kind of healthcare that's being provided to the front door of people's homes. Are they going to monitor the AI? These are open questions and this is why I call the Gov cloud the tip of the iceberg because these things going to open up a slew of societal challenges as well as technology. This is what I'm looking forward to looking and talking to the array of guests that we have because you've just opened up this Pandora's box of questions, right? Government is, as you said, it has a CYA mentality. Always has and should frankly to a certain degree, right? There has to be some process here. It can't just go willy-nilly. But as technology races to innovate, how does government keep maintaining that pace? Government just has to be agile. To me, you know, the change in the landscape certainly with the Trump administration from Obama has been like night and day. You had a president with no scandals at all in Obama who's done a lot of great things. Trump who's got the mojo saying, hey I'm going to drain the swamp, all that bravado and he's in a train wreck situation here going on in DC, it's kind of shaking things up. So I think this could be a catalyst opportunity. But one of the things that's interesting is that if you look at education and healthcare for instance, if you get government for a minute, real impactful human civilization issues. Health and human services can be completely transformed by technology. Education to me seems like a slow motion video game that's lagging. The kids are getting so much more education online than they are in the linear analog classroom and some people are trying to get iPads and do some things differently, integrating curriculums. There's a whole disruption. I mean, I watch my kids learning and it's like boring school that's going so slow and linear and they're online, putting my stunts, building his own motor skateboard, he's doing YouTube, essentially a robotics club at home from YouTube videos. So you're seeing the e-learning impacting education. What does that mean for education? That means they've got to be more competitive. At the end of the day, the competitiveness of the groups within public sector have to step up their game and the only way they're going to do that is build more better apps and apply what they got to the people they're targeting and deliver it better, faster, cheaper than before, that is why Amazon is poised in my opinion to do extremely well. And because Amazon being a global brand and many of these companies with international footprints, are they bringing back experiences from developing countries who maybe don't have that education infrastructure in place and are leapfrogging to the technology and then able to bring back these kinds of lessons to the United States? You know, John, you and I both love golf and we talk golf all the time. I use the golf analogy here for the golfers out there, for the non-golfers, I'm sorry, but it's like playing with old clubs and someone comes up and starts winning everything because they got the big fat driver, they get the new technology. So it kind of depends, right? I mean, it depends what your legacy is. So a lot of countries, your question about international have no infrastructure and all of a sudden when they stand up these three, four G, five G LTE towers, they have full connectivity, they've got better connectivity wirelessly than a third generation have better connectivity than us. So it all comes down to the legacy and the baggage and that is why I see the transformation really being celebrated with the cloud because the US public sector in North America, they've got so much legacy baggage that's slowing them, that's anchoring them down. They got to unleash that and it's going to take a progressive mentality. It's going to take someone saying, hey, let's get the civil liberties of our citizens nailed down. Let's deliver better services and it's more expensive every day, faster and better. And that's the Amazon way, in my opinion. That's why they've been doing well in the startup world and that's why they're now doing well in the enterprise. That's the secret to their success. But before we jump into our first guest of the day, they're coming up in just a few moments here. What's your, if you have two or three curiosity points or questions that you'd like to explore over the next day and a half with our guests, what would those be? To me, I mean, I've been involved in public sector in my career, previous jobs, so I kind of get a sense of the moving parts. I don't think anyone would argue in public sector, yeah, we want technology. I think to me it's how to get it done. The question of how to get it operationalized. So to me what I'm looking for is how decisions get made, how the organizational structures are changing to make decisions that are more DevOps oriented and how the transformation of the process of deploying, acquiring the technology. Because that's really the key, the disruption of the business model of cloud, renting versus buying, and then to how those decisions get made, my questions will be all about not only the vision and the roadmap of what technology impact is, but how does reality play out? Lend me that's the key there. Also want to take a minute, John, if you don't mind to thank our sponsors. Absolutely. Without our sponsors, theCUBE would not be allowed to go to these events because they're expensive to run. And want to thank our sponsors. We get to do our good work thanks to the sponsorship support, our business model sponsorship generated. We appreciate that. I want to give a shout out to AWS as a main sponsor with Intel. I'm going to thank Intel. Intel's doing some great stuff with AI again across multiple sectors of the business. 5G, network transformation, cloud, et cetera. Riverbed, want to thank Riverbed. Give a shout out to Fugue, who's really taking agencies to the cloud with some of the things I talked about. And Dhruva, want to thank those guys for putting the business model and the cloud together with Amazon here in theCUBE. So thanks to the sponsors. Go check them out. Tell them we sent you get a 10% discount on all their products and services. Only kidding. Yeah, time out on that. That was just kind of a joke. All right, John, we're going to do it, Jay. Here we go. All right, we're off and running. All right, we'll be back with more live coverage. Today is public sector of this short break.