 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. Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE, we are live in Washington D.C. at Amazon Web Services, AWS Public Sector Summit. This is their big event, this is their reinvent for the public sector, but it's technically a summit. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Next guest is Craig Atkinson, who's the CEO of JHC Technologies, small business partner doing huge deals. Great to have you on, thanks for coming on. And thanks for having us. So you guys have a lot of experience working very on the front lines with some really big deployments, implementations with cloud, working with some agencies. So first question is right on the gate is, is this really happening, this cloud thing? Yeah, absolutely, and it's been a, we started the company in 2010. One of my partners and I had done, worked on recovery.gov as a cloud engineer and it was just something that at the time, no one knew what the cloud was and we really looked at this as an opportunity when we started the business, this is where things are going to go. We didn't realize when we started the company though, as a small business, you can't just get started and say yeah, we know the cloud, we can help you do these things. You have to have past performance, you have to have relationships and so it's taken so long for the government to get around to the point where they're really at this, just starting now to put a lot of larger production workloads into the cloud and it's been a long journey where you've had this, it's like Groundhog Day, you have the same conversation over and over again with different people and different organizations about security, about compliance, about a variety of issues, how you procure it and everyone has the same questions, has the same problems and it's so much about education. And there's a lot of upfront medicine you got to take. Like you said, if you're new, it's like a jungle, wait a minute, I thought it was going to be easier. How did you guys, what was the key motivational point? How did you keep going? What was the driving force? Was it Amazon Tailwind for you? Was it more of grinding it out? The Amazon, our relationship with Amazon Web Services has been great. They've been a tremendous supporter of us and as a small business, they've really relied on their partners to be a force multiplier for them in the public sector space and that's been tremendous for us. They've really allowed us to play. And that's true, that's actually, they're doing that. Yeah, absolutely. And not necessarily the case as much on the commercial side where they're more apt to deal directly with the customers but they really relied on the partner network and partner ecosystem on the public sector space to really help them drive things forward. So for us, to have that relationship has been tremendous value for us. But also, we do things and allow those to broaden the group of what we have from a vehicle's perspective, small business set-asides that allow us to do business with organizations that AWS can. Let's take a minute to explain what you guys do. Great commentary on the cloud and your opportunity. What do you guys do for service? What kind of services are you providing? And can you take a minute to talk about the company? Sure, I mean, so when we started the company in 2010 and really it was a two partners and I said, we had been consultants in the IT industry, had worked in the belt way, and felt like we should do a company that was different than everyone else. More of a commercial style focused entity where it's about the technology and how do you bring that disruptive technology to government and business so that they can take advantage of it as opposed to being overwhelmed by it. And the cloud is really that underlying core technology that really affects, it's really a paradigm shift for how organizations do business. So for us, you know, it was, that's the area we want to get into. When we did a lot around mobility, a lot around collaboration, virtualization, virtual apps, virtual desktops, but really at the end of the day, cloud- Are you writing software or are you doing integrator? No, no, no, we're really, again, we, it was about building a company that technologists who are in this area, who are, you know, there's some great, smart people who are working in this area. From a, people in the belt way, you'll sit at a desk doing a job for five years. Your company that will lose that contract to some other company, you'll stay in the same seat. You'll go work for a different company for the next five years. Somebody else will win the contract and you stay in that same seat. So it's a, you're really working for the agency and not really working for the company that you're employed by. And we really wanted to build something that was more commercial-esque where it was about, what do you bring to me as an organization? How do I put you in a position that you're challenged by the workload that's in front of you, that you get to do different things and that, you know, you're more upwardly mobile as opposed to just being a butt in a seat, as what they'd like, what work they call it. So this morning, Teresa showed a slide. I think I counted 60 consulting partners. Now you guys have achieved a premier consulting partner status. Yes. You're not like an everyday name with some of the big guys that are on there. So how did you achieve that? How do you differentiate in that sea of really world-class consultants and how do you achieve that premier status with AWS? It's been a lot of work. I mean, for us, I mean, I think there's, there are some organizations that've gotten it just based off of their size and it was what AWS needs to have those larger partners. We, I think we really did earn it. We've met every requirement to get to that status. And for us, it's a huge badge of honor that we've achieved that. And it's a lot of hard work for a small company. We have, we're coming up on 70 employees. So we're not, you know, not a 10,000, 20,000 employee environment. So for us to achieve that and have the level of sales and that we do in the space, it's certainly not easy. It's really being singularly focused on the vision of how we want to run the company and sticking to that, even though the market may try to push you other directions and even your customers say, we're not ready for cloud, that you have to really stick to it and be focused on that being your core business. You talked about moving production workloads to the cloud earlier. I wonder if you could help us sort of squint through that because when you talk to what Andy Jassy calls the old guard, John, right? The old guy, they'll say, people aren't moving production workloads into the cloud. When you talk to AWS, you just referenced production workloads are going into the cloud. I'd like to talk to consultants who are, at least quasi-independent, what's really happening there? What kind of production workloads are going into the cloud? I think we're just now hitting that part of the market where we're starting to see more of the large scale production workloads being moved to the cloud. We moved our first organization, a 2,500 user environment, that we moved to the cloud three, four years ago. So for us being able to do that kind of workload to be all in on the cloud isn't something that we shyed away from. But when you started to deal with a lot of these organizations we had prime contracts with NOAA, which has massive data, US Pat trademark office and work with USGS. Some of these agencies have massive data. They just weren't really built as an organization to be able to adopt that cloud technology. So we really looked at it a couple of years ago and made a bit of a conscious effort to help to push them as an organization to understand the structure of how they need to really build their organization. We're very much an ITIL shop on how you build an IT process. But even with that, it doesn't really take in innovative technology. The speed at which AWS innovates and produces new technology, new features is something that I don't think that anyone has seen before in an IT realm. So building an organization that's able to understand that, to be able to implement that technology and be in a compliant manner to make it available to their application owners and their users is something that you really have to have the right organizational structure to be able to achieve. And why is that not a problem for AWS customers, your customers? Because if a legacy IT vendor, first of all, they can't innovate that fast. But if they were to innovate that fast, they tend to move at a much slower speed. The IT organizations that buy from them. Why is that pace of innovation not problematic for your customers? I think it is, but it's, and again, I think our challenge has been to help them to build the type of an organization that can respond to that. Knowing that there's one constant in IT technology today, which has changed, that whatever's here today is going to be different tomorrow. There's going to be new features and you have to be able to build an organization that isn't just, we're going to build a data center, build a bunch of firewalls around it, put our data there and we're going to be safe. Today's IT landscape moves too quickly. You really have to build, look to the way that it's done in the commercial enterprise is the way a Netflix builds really to be disruptive, I mean, to be destructive and how they build their technology knowing it's going to fail and look to do that same type of an implementation to help build your security within a federal organization. You got to change the culture and process, all of everything all at once with new tech. So I got to ask you the question that was in everyone's mind, mine included is what's your observation of the current state of affairs with respect to cloud native and cloud because you got people who might jump on and say, I love this, so it'll be fearful. You're in there, what's the new aha moment that people are having? Can you share some insight into what's going on in the mind and the actual implementations? What's changed? What's the most important story that we should be telling? I think that we're right now at that point. I think that's probably, I've heard reports less than 7% of the data center workloads have been moved to infrastructure as a service. I think that's probably even on the high side, 7%. But you're now starting to get all the work that we've done with a lot of these organizations is they've been pilots, proof of concepts, really dipping their toe, large organizations just dipping their toe in the water. We're getting to the point now where these organizations are approaching their primary applications for their organization and saying, we're ready to move that too. And for us, it's a lot, it's been so much education, so much work to try to help get them there. So for us, we're just excited to actually see it come to fruition. In 2010, the round of time you started your company, I remember John VMware at the time Paul Moritz was saying, any app, any workload will run on VMware. And there were a lot of skeptics and they've largely achieved that. Remember they used to talk about the software mainframe. The cloud, similar kind of narrative. Now it's a little different now. Let's take an example of Oracle in particular. You're seeing Oracle use, for example, it's pricing power to really try to force people to use its own cloud, jacking up prices if they want to use it on Amazon. What do you tell customers that are basically reliant on that Oracle database? Should they move that into the cloud? Should they try to figure out, okay, let's go to Aurora or Redshift or some other patent. What's their right strategy? So I mean, we're technology agnostic, generally speaking. That's why I can trust your answer here. But we really do lean toward what we call best in breed technologies. So AWS has been something that we've been all in on AWS since 2011, 2012. We've made that a conscious effort. And they've really done some things, I think as part of their business model that we really appreciate as a partner and as a customer. We've always had our infrastructure from day one on AWS. Also our infrastructure on Office 365. So we understand where to focus those efforts. When it comes to what the organization like an Oracle, I don't want to necessarily disparage them, but they're not necessarily focused on bringing the best value of their customers. A lot of times it seems that it's about what's right for the bottom line of their stockholders and what drives up the price of stock as opposed to what's the best solution I could put forward to really be great at database. So I think if you look at it, AWS has already built a roadmap to where you can get 70 to 80% of your database applications to be migrated to an open software database model. And you can massively reduce, so many of these large organizations, a large portion of their IT spend is on those Oracle, those specialty applications. So if you can drop that cost by 60, 70%, but we always tell our organization, don't just throw that money away, take those savings. Roll that into making a better application. Use that 60, 70% savings and fix how you deliver. Make your data more mobile, make it more available to your user base. Invest in analytics. Invest back in how you're doing it, using Redshift or whatever other analytics to get better results. Yeah, awesome, Craig. Great insight, congratulations on your success at JHC Technologies, you're the founder and CEO of, and congratulations on all the hard work. And you got to just, I won't say do your time, I've heard that quote in the government's sector, you got to do your time. Time's shrinking with the clouds. So, you know, got a great opportunity. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Yeah, thank you very much for having me. Okay, you're watching theCUBE here live in Washington DC. I'm John Furrier, stay with us. Day one here is continuing. Be right back.