 Welcome back to Las Vegas. theCUBE is here live at AWS re-invent 2021. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. theCUBE has two sets, Dave, two not one, two. Two live sets, two remote sets, over 100 guests on the program at this event. It's a lot. Talking about the next generation of cloud innovation with AWS and its massive ecosystem of partners. And we are pleased to welcome Moulton Smith to the program, the public sector director of strategic partnerships for worldwide technology. Moulton, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me. It's really amazing to be here and look forward to a great conversation. Isn't it great to be in person again? It's so nice to be in person. I mean, I'm glad everybody's being safe and checking vaccine status and whatnot, but it's good to get back and work with people because we can really drive innovation when we get together. Those hallway conversations or those conversations here at events that you just can't replicate by video conferencing, right? Not replicate that. You get grabbed in the hall and say, hey, have you thought about leveraging X, Y, Z to do something? That's what makes this conference great. Talk to me about what's going on at WWT. What are some of the things that you guys have been working on? It's a really exciting time at Worldwide. We're really working closely with AWS to drive innovation to the edge. We're excited about their outpost offering. We actually have one in our data center. Sandy announced it today in a partnership with Intel to allow our customers to work out use cases, to kick the tires, so to speak, to see how it works, as well as our partners to get their ISV product certified on the outpost platform. So I'm familiar with your ATC in St. Louis. Is that what you're referring to? That's correct. Give us a little insight into what goes on there. I know it's pretty amazing from a customer perspective because you are agnostic. You're there to serve the customer, but tell me what happens in the ATC. We say we're agnostic, but we have our preferences, because we know what actually works. But our ATC is our crown jewel. It's about a $600 million data center that we built solely for proof of concepts for our customers. So our top customers come in and say, I have this problem, how can I solve it? And so with us being the single biggest reseller, just about every ISV is out there, I can stand up a Dell compute next to NetApp Storage with Cisco router on top of it to replicate what my customer has at the VA, for example, and then to be able to plug in an outpost to show how leveraging the outposts can give them a single pane of glass to be able to work on their workloads. So the training that our FSIs, federal system integrators have put into their staff or government customers on the Amazon platform can now be driven into their data center. So it's really taking the cloud down to where the data is. In terms of public sector, what are some of the prominent use cases that you guys are helping customers to solve, especially given the tumultuous times that we're still living in? Sure, so what we saw during COVID, especially was how most of the government agencies had the capability to allow, say five to 10% of our workforce to work remotely. And then with COVID, they went to 95% to 100% workforce. So a lot of the time we've spent over the last year is how do we securely allow our government employees to get access to the information? Because as we know, the government was more valuable than ever to get us through this pandemic. We had to give them the tools that they needed to be able to make the decisions to move the country forward. Talk about security if you will for a second. We have seen such a dramatic change in the security landscape, the threat landscape, ransomware as a service. It's the cyber criminals, a lot of money in it, they're becoming far more brazen. What are some of the things that you're seeing specifically with respect to security use cases? It's gone from, let me just buy everything that's out there and that'll give me security to, I need to have visibility into my environment because if you look at Target, it's a great case studies around that. They had all the tools, they just didn't tie it all together. And so as more and more nation-state actors try to attack our government or it's a great way to make money, I mean, in the presentation Sandy today, they talked about if you looked at the GDP of what's been taken in ransomware, it's like the 10th biggest country in the world. I mean, it's scary and staggering how much money is lost. So what we think going back to our ATC, we can stand up their environment, we can work with the top security providers in the world to show those customers how we can give them that visibility, the protection and the ability to get back up because there's really only two types of organizations, those who've been hacked and those who don't know they've been hacked. They're going to get in, it's how do we mitigate the damage, how do we get them back up and running and how do we protect my customers or have some of the most sensitive data in the world? How do we protect that so our government can keep us safe and keep us moving forward? Yeah, because these days it's a matter of when we get hacked, not if. And of course we're only hearing about the large attacks. We don't hear about all of the ones that go on day in and day out. I think I saw a stat recently that a ransomware attack happens like once every 11 seconds. Correct, I mean, just walking through here how many text messages you've gotten. You want a free iPad, click here. I mean, they're down to the individual level. It's a whole lot cheaper to give a couple people really powerful laptops, pizza and beer, and have them go attack than it is to set up a real business. And so unfortunately, as long as there's money in it, there's going to be bad actors out there. We think partnering with AWS and other partners can help build solutions. You know, WWT has had an interesting history because you didn't start with the dawn of cloud. Right. So you've been in the business of IT for a long time and logistics out of St. Louis in a lot of ways. What does that look like in terms of navigating that divide? You know, there's a whole storied history of companies that were not able to cross the divide from the mainframe era to the client server era, let alone to cloud. You seem to have, you seem to be doing that pretty well. I appreciate that. I mean, we're the biggest company no one's ever heard of. We're $14, $15 billion privately held firm. The same two guys that founded it still run it today. And all they want to do is do cool things. They want it to be truly the best place to work. So from day one, they've invested in training our staff, building the ATC to give us the tools we need to be successful. And then because we're a trusted partner with Amazon and Intel and our other partners out there, they're investing in us to help build solutions. So we have over 6,000 engineers that get up every day. How do I build something that can help our customers really drive change and innovation? So it's been a really fun ride and the best is yet to come. Talk to me about your customer focus. You know, when we talk, here we are at reInvent, we always talk with AWS about their, you know, Dave, we talk about this customer obsession, the fact that they're working backwards from the customer. Do you share that sort of philosophy? Does WWT share that philosophy with AWS? 100%. If you go to www.t.com, we've published everything that we have. So you can get full access to our lab to learn about XISV and go deep and see the million and a half labs we've built around, say, Red Hat and go and get access to it. So we think that if we educate our customers, there are going to be customers for life and they're going to come to us with their biggest problems. And that is what's exciting and what enables us to really continue to grow. And how did the customers help you innovate? And that's one of the things we, I was thinking yesterday with this AWS flywheel of when Adam was introducing and now we have it, now we have it. It was because he would say, we did this, but you needed more, but you being the customer needed more. 100%. We want our customers to come to us with their biggest problems because that's when the exciting innovation works. And so the ability to sit down with the foremost expert in virus control and be able to, what are the tools does she need to be able to get ahead of a next change to COVID? How can we give them the tools to do that? That's what we want to do. The scalability, the ability to reach out to others is what Amazon brings. So we can bring the data science. We can bring the understanding of the storage, the security and then network. And then AWS gives that limitless scalability to solve those problems and to bring in someone from Africa to bring in someone from the European Union to work together to solve those problems. That's what's exciting. And then coming back to the outpost to be able to put that in the data center. We know the data center is better than just about anybody out there. So the ability to add innovation to them to bring those ISV partners together, it's really exciting that Intel is funding it because they know that if customers can see the art of the possible, they're going to push that innovation. One of the things we've also sort of thematically Dave and I with guests and the others been talking about this week is that every company has to be a data company. Whether it's public sector or private sector, if you're not, or if you're not on your way, there's a competitor right here in the rearview mirror ready to take your place. How do you help public sector organizations really develop, embrace, and execute a data core strategy? So we have a cadre of over 125 data scientists that work every day to help organizations unlock their most valuable asset, that data, their people, and be able to put the data in the right place at the right time. And so by investing in those data scientists, investing in the networking folks to be able to look at the holistic picture is how we can bring those solutions to our customers because data is the new oil of the environment. And sorry for my Southern twang on the oil. But it truly is the most valuable asset they have. And so how do we unlock that? How do they pull that data together, secure it, because now that you're aggregating all that data, you're making it a treasure trove for those bad actors that are out there. So you've got to secure it, but then to be able to learn and automate based on what you learn from that data. You know, I think with hindsight, it's easy to say, well, of course, WWT is where WWT is today. Five years ago though, I think it would have been an honest question to ask, how are you going to survive in the world of cloud? And here we are, you've got outposts. And of course it makes sense because your focus on customers sounds like I'm doing a commercial for you, but I've been a fan. I appreciate that, so we like it. I have worked with you guys in a variety of roles for a long time. Seems like yesterday we were testing a bunch of different storage arrays of the ATC. And now you've got outposts and cloud and you're integrating it together. It's really more the same. I'm sure if we had your founders here, they'd tell you, Dave, it's all the same. Correct. It's all the same. It's IT, it's where's the compute, where's the storage, how do you get access to it? And the cloud has given the ability to scale and do things you could never imagine. I think it's the reason we're here is because our leadership continues to invest and push in that envelope to give people the freedom to go out with that crazy idea, what if we did this? And having the tools and the ability to do that is what drives our innovation. And that's what we bring to our customers and our partners, that ability to innovate to tackle that next problem. So what's the tip of the spear right now for you guys? What are you, what's kind of, what's next? What are you waiting to have delivered to the ATC to rack and stack and cable up? Stuff that I can't tell you about. Because there's things that Amazon is always working on that we work with before it's made public. So there's a lot of really cool stuff in the pipeline because as you think about moving to the data center, that's one thing, moving truly to the edge where you can help that warfighter, where you can help that mission, where you can do disaster recovery, leveraging the snowball family, the outpost family and custom built tools that really allow for a quick response to whatever that problem is is that next front. And that's where we've been for a long time, helping our warfighters and folks do what needs to be done. Outposts is that you can leverage big AWS to build the models, push it down to the edge because you don't have time or the bandwidth to get it back into the big cloud to be able to put that compute and storage and analytics on the edge to make real-time decisions is what we have to do to stay relevant. And that's where the joint partnership is really exciting. It's what you have to do to stay relevant. It's also what your customers need because one of the things that we've learned in the pandemic is that real-time data and access to it is no longer a nice to have. This is business critical for everything. Correct. And even if you have a fat pipe to get it, you need to make real-time decisions. And if you're in a really sandy space, excuse me, making hard decisions, you've got to get the best information to that soldier when they need it to save our lives or to save the other people's lives. So it's not just a nice to have, it's mission critical. It is mission critical. Walton, thank you so much. We're out of time. But thank you for joining Dave and me talking about- Really enjoyed it. All the stuff going on with Worldwide, the partnership with AWS, how you're helping really transform the public sector. We appreciate your time and your insights. Thank you so much. Have a great conference. Thanks, you too. Yeah, thanks. All right, from my buddy, Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage.