 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, CUBE virtual coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, which is also virtual. We're not in person this year, we're doing the remote interviews, but of course getting all the stories, and of course re-invent is full of partnerships, full of news, and we've got a great segment here with Salesforce and AWS. Eileen Schneider-Wynn, who's the Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships, and Maureen Laundrigen, Director of Worldwide Training and Certification AWS. Maureen, Eileen, great to see you. Thanks for coming on, and nice keynote. What's up with the partnership? Give us a quick overview, Eileen. What's the Salesforce AWS partnership? Take a minute to explain it. Sure, thank you. I think I'll start out by talking about how Salesforce thinks about strategic partnerships. So for us it's really, it starts with the customer and being where they want us to be. And we've been so fortunate to be in this relationship with AWS for over five years now. It really started out as an infrastructure-based partnership as we were seeing customers start their digital transformation journeys and move to the cloud. But what has been really exciting as we've spent more time working together and working with our customers, we've now started to move into a motion of really bringing some differentiated solutions between the number one CRM and the most broadly adopted cloud platform to market for our customers in areas like productivity, security, and training and certification which we'll talk more about in a bit. And specifically, some of those solutions are service cloud voice product which we launched this summer announced last fall at Dreamforce as well as our private connect product which creates great security between the AWS platform and Salesforce. What's some of the impact areas? I'll say the two clouds you make to CRM and Amazon. We're seeing data obviously being a part of the equation AI machine learning. What's been the impact, Eileen, to your customers specifically? Yeah, so specifically, I'd call out two areas. One is really that foundation of security, specifically as government regulations and data security has become more critical. We've really been able to partner together there and that's been crucial for certain customers in certain regions as well as certain industries like government. In addition, I would call out again that service cloud voice partnership. As we see the world moving more digital, this really allows customers to go quickly and turn on their our solutions from anywhere at any time. You know, I love that any time, anywhere kind of philosophy now more than ever with the pandemic, collaboration is required more than ever. And some people are used to it. You know, I've seen more technical developers that are used to working at home, but not everyone else. The workforce still needs to get the job done. So this idea of collaboration, what has the impact been for your customers and how are you guys helping them? Because I think this is a big theme of this year that's going to not only carry over even when the pandemic's over, this idea of anywhere is all about collaboration. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, the exciting thing about the partnership is we've been talking digital transformation with customers for years. But I think what we saw at the beginning of this year as we were all thrown home and forced to, you know, fire up our jobs from our bedrooms or our garages, it really came down to our ability to work quickly and turn on our solutions. It's, and these unprecedented times while we're going through this now, everything we're building really is the future. So it's not just the tools and technology, it's also the processes and how work is getting done. That's really come into play. But again, I'll anchor back to that service bot voice solution. So for us, call centers were completely disrupted. You think of call centers and, you know, pre-2020, everyone's sitting in a room together, agent side-by-side, managers having the ability to pop over and assist with a call or manage an escalation. Now that's been completely disrupted and it's been very exciting for us to work with our customers to reimagine what that looks like. Again, both from a technology perspective, but also from a process perspective. And along with that, we've had to reimagine how employees are learning these solutions and being trained. So we're very grateful for the partnership with AWS and we're doing some really amazing things together. You know, this is one of my favorite things about the enablement of cloud, but Salesforce has been a pioneer, as you pointed out. This connectedness feature has always been there. Now more than ever it's highlighted with call centers not the call center anymore, it's the connected center. People are connecting and I think Maureen, I think last time you were in theCUBE a few years ago, we were talking about virtual training online and that was pre-pandemic. Now you're seeing surge of online training, not only because people's jobs are changing and being displaced or even shut down, new roles are emerging, right? So the virtual space, virtual world, digital world, everyone's getting more digital faster now. How has the COVID-19 changed the landscape for training and skills demand from your perspective? I mean, at AWS we've been working on our virtual capabilities for a while. So we had a digital platform out, we had a great partnership, have a great partnership with Salesforce and putting content on Trailhead. We had to pivot very rapidly to virtual instructor led training and also our certifications, right? We were lucky that our vendors partnered with us rapidly to pivot certification to proctored environment and this actually has helped to expand our ability to deliver both training and certification in locations that we may not have been able to do before and we have seen, while it slowed initially, we have seen such an uptake in training over the last six to eight months, it's been incredible. We've been working with our customers, we've been working with our partnerships like Salesforce, we've been pushing more content out. I think customers and partners are really looking for how to upscale their employees in a way that is easy for them. And so it's actually been a great surprise to see the adoption of all of our curriculum over the last couple of months. Well, congratulations, I know there's a lot more work to do and it's going to get more engaging, more virtual, more rich media. But this idea of connectedness, Alina, I want to get back to your thoughts earlier. Mention Trailhead, Maureen mentioned Trailhead. You guys are doing some work with the virtual training there. What can you tell us more about that and how that's going so far? Sounds great. So Trailhead is our free online learning platform and it really started because we have a commitment to democratizing anyone's ability to enter our industry. So you can go there and both online or with our Trailhead Go app and experience what we call trails, which are our paths for learning. Again, on different areas of knowledge and skills and technology. And late last year, we announced an incredible partnership with AWS where we're bringing the AWS learning content and certification to Trailhead. And this is really, again, driven by our customers who are asking us to do our part in bringing more of these skilled resources into the ecosystem. But something I also want to highlight is I feel like this moment that we're in right now has also forced everyone to reimagine how they're doing learning, even businesses, how they're training their employees. And again, having this free platform and the partnership with AWS has really helped us go very quickly and create a lot of impact with customers. I just want to say I love the Trailhead metaphor, because learning's non-linear, it's asynchronous, you've got digital, so you want to take a shortcut. You got to know the maps and I think that's people want to learn versus the linear tracks. And I think that's how people have been learning online and AWS has got a data-driven strategy. Maureen, I want to get your take on this, because as you bring content onto Trailhead, can you talk about how that works and how you're working with Trailhead? Yeah, I mean, we started conversations a couple of years ago and I think the interesting thing is that Salesforce and AWS have a very similar philosophy about bringing education to anybody who wants it. You'll hear me talk a lot about that in my leadership talk at ReInvent, but we really believe that we want to provide content where learners learn and Salesforce and Trailhead have this amazing captured audience. And we're really looking at exploring how do we bring education to people that might not otherwise have access to it? And so we started with really foundational level content, AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials and AWS Cloud for Technical Professionals. And the interesting thing is both of those courses have been consumed. It's not enough to just put it out there. You want people to complete the trails. And we've seen such an amazing uptake on the courses with like 85% completion rate on one of the trails and 95% completion rate on the other one. And to keep customers engaged is really a credit to how Trailhead is designed. You know, it's interesting the certification people don't lose sight of the fact that that's kind of the end state. Then you start a new trail. Eileen, this is really what it's all about. Can you just share some observations that you've seen for people that are coming into this now to say, hey, okay, what do I expect? And what are some of the outcomes? Yeah, I mean, first, what we're seeing is our customers are being very clear that they need more of these skills. So we're also seeing the need for Salesforce administrators out in our ecosystem. And I think with everything going on this year, it's also an opportunity for people who are looking to pivot their careers or move into tech. And again, this free learning platform and the content that we're bringing has been really powerful. And again, for us, the need for Salesforce administrators and cloud practitioners out in our ecosystem are in more demand than ever. Maureen, from your perspective on AWS, you see a lot of the new jobs. Obviously, cybersecurity is the zillion openings. Where do you see the most need for training and certification? Can you highlight some of the areas that are emerging and trending, if you will? I would say it's interesting because what we're seeing is both ends of the spectrum. People that are really trained to just really understand who cloud is, whether it's a business leader within an organization, a finance person, a marketing person. So cloud practitioner, we're seeing huge adoption and consumption on both our platform and on Salesforce, but also some other areas are security and machine learning. Machine learning, we have five learning paths on our digital platform. We've also extended that content out to other platforms. And the consumption rate is significant. And so, I think we're seeing customers consume that, but the other thing that we're doing is we're really focused on looking at who doesn't have access to education and making sure that's available. So I think that the large adoption of cloud practitioner is largely due to the other things that we're doing with programs like restart and our academic programs. To close it out, Alina, I want to get your thoughts and final thoughts on the relationship and how people can find more information about this partnership and what it means. Take it home. Thank you for asking. So just like everything else we've been talking about today, we've had to reimagine how we're showing up at this event together. And a very exciting thing that my team has created is the AWS Virtual Park. And anyone can access that at salesforce.com slash aws. So please go check it out. You can experience our products, hear from our experts and experience its innovation on your own. Great insight. Thanks for coming on and participating. Really appreciate Salesforce and AWS. Two big, winning, leading clouds working together. Trailhead, great, great offering. Thanks for coming on and sharing the news. Appreciate it. Thanks, John. Thank you. Okay, it's theCUBE Virtual covering AWS Reinvent Virtual. Of course, check out all the information here all three weeks, wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.