 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. It's virtual this year because of the pandemic, we can't be in person normally with doing these interviews face to face, but we're here remote, I'm your host, John Furrier. We're theCUBE virtual and we're here with Theresa Carlson, who's the chief and heads up the public sector business for AWS and also now has industries, which is a lot of the verticals and just continues to have great leadership and continues to do well in the business side. Theresa, great to see you. For the eighth consecutive CUBE interview you've been on every year and we thank you for coming on, big year this year. Thanks for coming on, great to see you. Thank you, John, thank you for having me. It's hard to believe it's eight years already, wow. Well, first of all, I want to say congratulations. The first year you were on, you never wavered, you always had a North Star, you had the Amazonian kind of way, you told us what you were going to do and you did it, the CIA came on board and the dots just connected, so congratulations. This year more than ever, during your keynote and re-invent, even though it was virtual, again, you're raising the bar on the theme, leadership and making use of the data, two major themes this year on your keynote, because of the pandemic and just because of the cloud computing benefits are all kind of coming together, you're helping more people than ever, doing more public service with cloud when it needs it the most. This has been a big story, share your reaction to that. Yeah, well, John, thank you again for having me in your coverage of re-invent. It's been three weeks of, wow. I mean, three weeks, we did one, now we're doing three. But COVID, we're still not done, right? The vaccinations are out, people are starting to, I saw on the television yesterday here in the US, the first nurse that was vaccinated, but for us, I will tell you the data side of this piece during COVID has been huge, I mean, huge. It has been, our customers have always said data is golden for them, right? But during COVID, we have actually seen the use of data just go up like crazy. And not just the use of it, but I will say it's multiple data lakes that are used, hydrating multiple data lakes and using that data to merge. So if you think about economic data and health data and putting those data sets together in a way that they have deeper understanding of what's happening within their community, their state, their country. So we've seen a merging of data in a big way. If you think about the vaccinations themselves, John, that wouldn't have been possible to move this fast without the use of scalable compute, processing and analytics in a way like no one has ever seen it. And it's pretty amazing and I don't think we'll ever go back. And also I'll just say sharing of that data has changed. Researchers are now much more open to sharing that data. Our core 19 research site that we've done has thousands of researchers on it now, hundreds of thousands of views on it with people sharing research about COVID. And think about that. I mean, research has always been held tightly and now we're really starting to see them open up and share that data so that we can move much faster. I think doing that public service with the data has always been a killer idea. We talked about national parks being kind of open for the people over the years now, super computing and data. You guys do a great job doing that. But the other area that you're getting a lot of press on and rightfully so is an area that I know is close to your heart as well as our mission, which is getting people trained up on cloud computing. And you've done this for years, but this year more importantly with all the pressure and all the need, you guys have offered offering a huge training, skills training for 29 million people globally. I saw that on the news. I saw you on doing some TV interviews on this. It's been all over the press. It's been getting a lot of great buzz. Can you tell me more about what that is? Yeah, so part of my, when I picked up our industry business units also picked up our training and certification organization that's run by Maureen Lanagran. I know you've had Maureen on your show before too. And then I have education, which is run by Kim Egeris in the US and Max Peterson internationally. And we are now, we've merged so that we have a model that we can teach and train around the world in a much more scalable way. But this announcement was about going into 200 countries and territories, training 29 million people by 2025, free, do free skills training and making that available John through multiple different programs and scaling those. So we'll take the programs we have and we'll scale those up much more rapidly. And then now we'll also look for new programs that we need to run in parallel. Because that's what we do. We have to look around corners also and make sure that we have the right programs. And, you know, I've loved, I've loved, you know, they're all amazing but near and dear to my heart has always been our AWS educate, which we started for ages 14 and up to at the university and high school level to be able to start to bring on those cloud skills. Then we added badging and credentialing onto that. And from there, you can go into our academy which you can actually get certifications as a solution architect. But we've added so many more, our program restart now, which has been really successful, which is about training those who are jobless or in underserved communities and socioeconomic depressed areas. And I love that program. I told a story about an individual in Boston who had opened a training center, a gym. He's a fitness trainer. And he had to close it because, you know, COVID and he went through our 12 week restart training program and now has a job with a company there in Boston. And I just love those kinds of stories where you know that you're putting people to work. And I think for us, there's thousands and thousands of jobs around the world, just in any city if you search on cloud computing jobs open, I just looked in New York when I was on CNBC, I looked in New York and there are 10,000 cloud jobs just there in New York when I just did a quick search. So there's always jobs and we've got to make sure that we're skilling them so they can go now, fill those jobs. And that will help us close that gap, John, which we still have a big one to get all the jobs filled that are out there. That's a great mission. And I got to say it's super important because one is cloud computing, is openings for this kind of new paradigm which is now mainstream and playing out in real time as Andy was talking about. But also the global IT markets being reshaped by cloud computing. So you have the intersection of those two which is a new skill. You can't just take IT and make it cloud. You got to bring it together. So it's a great opportunity for someone to come into the industry and level up pretty quickly. You don't have to have the 20 year of experience to do this. You can come in. Totally. Incidentally level up and have a great job. You know, it's the one thing, John, I hear all the time around the world before from like when I would go and speak with university chancellors and presidents and just professors, they would say, hey, you know, AWS, we need you to do the micro credentialing along the way. And this was pre COVID when they said we need to get, you know, our students wanna work while they're in school. Well, now more than ever it's important. And we also, John Luke, just in September over 800,000 women left the workplace. That is a trend that we do not want and we cannot sustain. And so doing, you know, doing programs like this virtually that you can do self-paced environments, intensive environments. We wanna make these programs fit for whatever the individual needs. So it's not just a one size fits all. We wanna make sure that the programs that we're providing will fit the needs of the individuals doing the training. And I particularly am, I wanna push this with their, you know, inclusion and diversity of the individuals that we need to get into the workplace. But it is pretty alarming when you see that many women leaving the workplace. You know, when a choice is being made right now we're seeing women take the brunt of that. And we wanna make sure that they have the opportunity to work virtually, train themselves and get those new jobs that are out there in tech. Well, that's one of the questions I had for you. I'll just jump to that now and get back to some of the other ones. But the customers that pivot to remote work and learning, it's changing. And you know, I was riffing on an interview, I think it was with one of your public sector customers. The future of work and if you just think about the word work, workforce, workplace, workload, workflows. The notion of work is now impacted and you mentioned the diversity piece. This is an opportunity. So how should people think about this re-learning? So we don't lose people and we actually get a net positive inbound migration to the workforce. You know, the flexibility I had, I did a fireside chat with Indra Nune. He was the former CEO of PepsiCo and chairman and is now on our Amazon board for re-invent. And she talked about, you know, being your authentic self, curiosity. But one of her big points is women in the workplace. And she's gonna publish a new book soon and it's gonna be really focused on the kind of equity policy areas of need that we have to focus on to make sure that we have women being able to tackle both the home issues and being able to work and taking advantage of that plus 50%. And I would say the virtual opportunity is really fantastic, especially for all levels of socioeconomic individuals. Because you can work part-time, full-time, you can work virtually. And I do believe while we all want to get back into the workplace, I think for me, I'm a social animal. I'd love to be there sitting beside you, John. You know, I think for a lot of us, we kind of yearn to be back in the office. But there's also a lot that working from home is much more achievable for them, right? Especially with childcare or if school day, if it's a short day because of schools. And allowing flexibility with work is gonna be really important. And COVID has taught us that that is possible. My team did not miss a beat during COVID. I tell you, it's like unbelievable. Our business has really kind of been on fire because public sector, and if you look at the other industries I've picked up, financial services, energy and telecommunications and training and certification. These are all that had to keep going. Governments were moving faster than ever. So our team was really busy. I've had individuals ask me, well, how'd you manage the downtime? I was like, we didn't have any downtime. Like literally day one, we were like 24 seven and the teams were working with it pretty much every government around the world because COVID moved so quickly and all virtually. And I will have to say, John, I was really skeptical in the beginning about how is this, how are we gonna do this? But the teams really, we figured out how to operate. You know, you had to, it's a new vessel. You kind of have to build that virtual work vessel and figure out how you manage your day, how you fit things in. And then there's the point that people think you're always available because you are at home, right? So you can never, that you can't possibly not be available because you know, you are sitting at home. And then there's the funny times where people's cats walk across and kind of with their tail on their face. Dogs barking on video calls. Yeah, child runs in with the diaper and you know, it's all, you have to have grace and humor about all this sometimes too. Like you can't take everything so seriously. And perhaps we've learned that work and life can blend a little bit more, right? That you can have that when a lot of people, when they talk about work-life balance, now we have work-life harmony. You know, you and I have talked about this before. If you can tap whoever taps the diversity of talent will almost let me win the game and not just diversity in terms of gender or background, role. I mean, if you can tap the virtual space, you're a winner because there's talent out there that can be aggregated in and there's no stigma associated with anything. So, you know, this is, I think Andy kind of expressed that to me and he heard it in his keynote where he said, hey, people are square, but you can get more participation. I think that is a real positive upside. And I love your perspective of this new muscle. I totally agree. You need to have that new- I like the square. I mean, we've actually chatted, I don't know if we'll ever go back to having big rooms with people in it because you have a voice, you have a face. And I do believe, especially for women, John, who cannot always speak up, it's an opportunity for them to have their own space. They can have their own voice. All individuals, because sometimes they have great ideas that they don't always vote them. So having, you know, when each person has their own square, you can actually kind of see, well, who has an opinion? Who's spoken up? Who do I want to call on here and ask them if they have an opinion? So I like the idea of everybody having their own space when you're having a meeting if you have to be virtual because you get lost in translation, especially if you have that large leader in the room and everybody else is around them, then sometimes they only kind of adhere to their voice. This is an opportunity for others to really have that voice. I was just, I saw a joke on Twitter from a friend that said, hey, I run all the meetings now because I can mute people. So, if someone starts talking, you're muted, bye-bye. So again, this is a whole new muscle, great stuff. Well, since you brought up your role, I know you have a new expanded role. Could you take a minute to explain what that is? Because I'm still not clear. I know you've been doing an amazing job I've written about your initial successes and now you continue to do well with public sector. And believe me, it's exploding. I see it. We're reporting on it. Public service is changing with digital transformation. But these other things, what are you working on? What are the new areas? Yeah, so I just passed my 10th year. I'm starting my 11th year and it's been like amazing building this public sector business and our government customers. Wow, the innovation and education during COVID has been pretty off the charts, which I don't think will slow down. And then a few months ago, I was asked to take on our training and certification org and our evangelist and solution architecture org along with the industry business units of the finance, telecommunications and energy. And then, John, if you're remembering June, I announced our aerospace and satellite industry business unit. So these are the ones that we have right now are very regulated. A lot of them are very closely aligned to a regulated industry. There could be others that are not as regulated, but the ones right now, if you think about aerospace and satellite, financial services, telecommunications and energy. So for me, they're very akin to a lot of the work I've been doing in building public sector because when I go into a country today, when my teams go in, we generally always have to work with these groups. So if you think about telecommunications, we have to go in and make sure that we're working on our networking, our connectivity, and we negotiate and work with those telco providers. Same with the energy companies, both large ones and small ones, we go in and we work to build power purchasing agreements that solar power renewable energy to power our data centers and make sure that we're giving back to the grid. So we have that partnership. And then in the financial sector, I've had all of our regulators anyway, like FINRA, Fed Reserve, IRS Treasury. So I've always had all the regulators. So now working with the additional, the banking, the investment sector, capital markets, it seems so natural if that makes sense. And now diving into the upstream and downstream supply chain for both energy and telco. And what a fantastic time now for telcos with 5G. I mean, I've been saying for two or three years that I thought this would be a huge opportunity for telecommunications companies to actually look for new work streams for their customers. And I mean, EDGE now connect our call centers that they can do and take advantage of that. So I'm actually really excited, John seeing some of the new opportunities and renewable, the new energy startups that are out there, the things I'm seeing power solar nuclear and then seeing a lot of the larger energy companies take on these projects. It's a lot of fun. And I'm very excited now to continue to meet those customers. I got to meet a lot during re-invent. I love their energy. I love kind of learning about what they're looking to solve. And I'm also just looking forward to helping them with the connections that we've already been doing in government. I think it's a really nice combination of working together now. Yeah, I see it as what you've done with public sector was take a partnership approach to an old standing industry, change them quickly, get the transformation, build the relationships, get the successes and establish that transformation. And it's needed versus the organically developing, stuff that's going to be like startups and whatnot. Those are going to use Amazon, but you're a transformational leader. John, if I could just say for a minute, if you think about reinvention, we're at reinvent and a lot of the are going through massive reinvention. You know, again, 5G with Telco, renewables with energy and then financial services where everything is kind of moving to an online model and digital model with different types of currencies that they have to deal with. It's really perfect for cloud and what we offer. So I think the opportunity to dive in and really partner with these industries and aerospace and satellite, oh my gosh, it's just, I have to say, I really do believe cloud computing is the perfect kind of step forward with all these industries for reinvention and innovation, which they're all moving toward. Well, Teresa, you're a reinvention leader. We've covered it and now we got all new territory for you to work on. Bring your playbook, you know? People centric, partner, results. Hard charging. Teresa, thank you for your time. We're backwards from the customer. Great to have you on. Great to see you. I wish you were in person in real life again soon. Thank you for coming on. John, thank you. Happy holidays. I look forward to seeing you next year. Cheers. Okay, it's theCUBE's coverage of AWS Reinvented. We have Teresa Carlson. She heads up to public sector. She's the chief of the whole public sector and now taking on other industries to bring that playbook, the reinvention to the industries, really a big part of the Amazon web services vision and cultural changes going on with the pandemic, re-changing and reformatting and refactoring industries. That's what's going on in the big picture and a lot of gay tech under the hood. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.