 From Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE coverage here by Rain for AWS Summit, Cloud Computing's changing the landscape startups, business, government, and society. We're here with a special guest, his Excellency, Amen Terefiq Almoyed. Thank you very much. Thanks for coming. Thanks for joining us. And of course, Max Peterson, Vice President of International Sales, Worldwide Public Sector for Amazon Web Services. Good to be here, John. Your Excellency, this program you're doing with Amazon, this MOUU sign, is interesting. I want to unpack it because it speaks to the bigger picture of how the region is shaped by its generational shift of cloud computing and the people here. This is a really big part of this modernization plan. No question, no question. So the program that the government adopted, so Vision 2030, which was adopted a while ago, is based on one premise, one key premise, that the government is going to move from operator to regulator. And our focus would be to focus on and establish, create almost an open, just competitive environment. So the idea is for us to provide the platform and then allow the meritocratic system to let those that can aspire to opportunities and reach these opportunities come up through the system. So this program really sets the stage to get a new level going. Explain the difference with this program and why it's different than some of the things we've been hearing. We saw a cloud computing degree coming out of the University of Bahrain. We're seeing a lot of job skill training. This is different. This is a unique thing. Give it more detail around how it works. So what we're doing is we're looking at very quick wins. And for us, six months, so for somebody to spend six months, one year in Amazon, is a very quick win. This is not an extended degree. What this is, is it's an opportunity to interact with the best of the best in their world sector. And to honestly, it's almost like a reset where what Max and I were talking about earlier is somebody that spends a year with Amazon, I think something happens to the pulse rate, all right? So your pulse literally starts to beat much faster. Max does all about that. Yeah, exactly, exactly. We hear about their traveling patterns and that in itself is amazing. So in any case, so the reason it's different from a degree is it gives you real life vocational experience. It gives you the networking opportunity. It gives you the lifestyle exposure. And then it gives you the shortcuts and organizations. So you're exposing them to the excellence of what a culture looks like. Amazon is on this case. They're hard charging, they're fast. Anyone who's worked with Amazon knows that they move pretty quickly. But they're disciplined. It's a world-class organization. Right, right, right. It's like a sports team being promoted to varsity or the protein. Exactly. Worked their way up from the entry level. So maybe the difference as well is in this sort of program, it's sync or swim. It's really as simple as that. I mean, you need to hit the ground running and take off. Maybe with a degree, it's much less so. With a degree, you go through your first year, your second year, your sophomore and so on. So what we want is we want our youth to hit the ground running. We want very quick wins. And I have no doubt that once the first tranche, first team, goes out to Amazon, comes back, I'm sure that the ripple effect that you see in the industry and you see in the marketplace will be tremendous. Max, what's your take on this? Cause obviously you're on the Amazon side. You taking them in Amazon web services here in Bahrain or is it outside corporate headquarters in Seattle? Is there a definition around? All good questions. First, we're excited to be the first company that has partnered with the ministry on this effort. We're sure many others are going to join but we're excited to be first. I think what makes it different is the aspect of experiential. There's a lot of experiential learning that's going on different than the academic learning. Equally or maybe even more necessary is the sort of organizational and cultural learning. Just what does it take to operate right at world scale or at pace? And then to be able to bring that back to the region, we'll do that wherever we've got the right mix of skills. So it could be in Bahrain where we've got a big office now. It could be in London, could be Washington D.C., could be Seattle. You're actually on C. We always talk about in the queue over the years, tech athletes, cause you know, to be an athlete, you got to have durability, intelligence, stability. Being a tech athlete, the travel schedules we were just choking last night about, I mentioned it, but also the intelligence and the integrity to do this at this speed. This is kind of, I love the theme. So I want you to elaborate why this connects in with your vision and how did this idea get started? What was the origination around this? So initially the, again, if one takes a step back, we started experimenting about a year ago, a year and a half ago, with the sports sector. So what we were doing with the sports sector, because it was a much smaller sector, what we're trying to experiment there is, if you were to allow our athletes to interact with the best in class, what would happen? Would they live up to that experience or not? And so one of the segments that we were looking at is for example, triathlons. So about two years ago, this sport, so for triathlons in general, just simply didn't exist in the region. So two maximum three years ago, they were non-existent. So His Highness had ordered that we go ahead and see if we can develop this and see if we can develop the athletes for it. And so what we needed to do essentially was find the athletes. Just find the athletes, exactly. Send them out. We did a few triathlons. They did Kuna in Florida, came back, loved it, the addiction and the adrenaline kicked in. And then we started arranging duathlons and then triathletes here in Bahrain. Of course, I don't know if you know this, fast forward a year and a half later and BE13, which is our triathlon team, is number one in the world. Simply, it's number one in the world. Now we're doing this, we tried this with biking. So we sent a team to the Tour de France and we started to do exactly the same thing. We were aspiring to look at greats like Sky team and the rest and just learn from them, imitate and then innovate and hopefully succeed. One, if you have to have the talent to begin with, your theory is put them in, let them see it and they'll either level up or they won't. It's self-selection. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, no question. And you want to bring that formula to check. It's pure meritocratic thinker swing. So there's two phrases that we live by. So number one, our role is open, competitive, just environments. That's it. Number two is we open doors with no hand-holding, simply no hand-holding. But we'll get you the opportunity. But if Amazon calls us and says, participant number 606 or whatever, isn't up to the cut, then they're not up to the cut. And what our youth have proven to us time after time is they're always up to the cut. As long as you make that clear, they live up to it. The expectation defines the experience. So if you say, this is what it is. Right, right, right, right. You could swim or you can sink. Exactly, exactly. Your choice, people will tap out, they won't even jump in. I like the tech athletes piece. Yeah, I'm loving it, yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean a lot of tech athletes, I mean it takes a lot of energy. It is, like you said, you don't know what it takes to build a company. Right, exactly. It's really hard, I mean it's not easy. It is, and the thing that, just like this program, the thing that was interesting about the University of Bahrain, idea was they're going to try and immerse everybody. Because cloud and technology now is immersed in any field. I mean, anything becomes digital. And we were talking earlier about eSports. So you need a whole bunch of great tech athletes to start bringing eSports services to the world. Absolutely. Do you see eSports? Yeah, no doubt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what we did on Friday is we signed the first agreement. This is the first time that a region hosts. We're hosting BLAST Pro's finals in Bahrain. This is going to be on the 13th and the 14th of December. And that's running, streaming on Twitch. So we're excited. We're excited to be doing this with the guys at BLAST Pro. And we're excited to be using Amazon's infrastructure to do it. So yes, absolutely. There's amazing things to be seen in eSports. And we're excited. This is awesome. Digital disruption. You guys have been so proactive on this. I was commenting this morning on Twitter, it was in stats went out about entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley in the US. 51% of all ventures fail. And some other ones, 4% become unicorns. But it was all about optionality, et cetera, et cetera. And entrepreneurs are about getting on the right wave. And falling in, trying again. And this is really, you guys have been very proactive on this. Right, so that's exactly why we think this sports plays a big role. So the idea behind the program was simply to gamify everything. The idea behind this program, the idea behind adopting the new bankruptcy law in Bahrain and new reform regulations that are coming in, all we're doing is gamifying things. What we're simply saying is when you fall, it's OK to fall. As long as you get back up and hit the ground running once again, we're OK with that. So you'll start to hear phrases that are pretty interesting. Like I said, with the entrepreneurship, what we're looking at is unlocking levels. So we're gamifying. With education, we're doing exactly the same thing. We're looking at vocational training where you get to unlock levels. So as long as people know that the name of the game is just to stay in the game, and then outpace everybody else, then we're good. And the funding's been fantastic. You guys have been supporting it with resources. Now that the region's up and running, Max, you're good about the development so far with the new region. Theresa was just on earlier, as she mentioned. First day, they turned it on. Bunch of companies were launched already. Well, besides the cannons and the confetti that shot out today at the summit, the other exciting things I think when we launched the region, we had over 350 different companies, many small businesses, small and medium enterprises, that put their offerings into the AWS Marketplace. So when it was launched, anybody in the region, anybody in Bahrain could literally turn on 1,700 different types of software solutions at the push of a button. So I think that's big. I think we heard how 35 local companies have created migration offerings and fast start offerings. We heard from one great entrepreneur on stage today. And we heard from government about how governments are operating faster than business. I think Sheikh Salman threw down a bit of a challenge to the rest of the government and state enterprises and even corporations. And then, of course, I think we saw the digital bank of the future from Bank ABC with their first virtual banking assistant up on stage, who, by the way, lives in the cloud over Bahrain. Yeah, digital employee, we had a great chat about that. This speaks to the generational shift. This is something that's going to be an interesting footnote in history. The sea chain around expectations, you brought this up earlier, I think is important. The younger generation, they want the world to be at a different speed. And they don't want any tolerant blockers in their way. And so whoever can be out front on setting up the environment, whether it's society, government, or citizens for services. But money making potential, banks got to operate. So this is the replatforming of society is happening. This is- No question, yeah, no question. I mean, I'll give you just the, when you compare ministries, when you compare government entities, you would walk in and you'd assume the ultra bureaucratic system is still in place, where you've got to go through tiers and so on and so forth. As far as the youth at the ministry of youth is involved, these guys are running things with chats. We've got internal chat systems. And so there is no memo writing process where you then have to escalate it and then it goes to the minister's office and so on. Absolutely not. These guys are on the likes of Slack, the likes of Teams or Microsoft and so on. And that's how government has run. Max, emails for old people like us. Hey, modern digital governments are redesigning the way all this stuff works. And it doesn't, the thing that's interesting to me, right, is it doesn't just impact these things that you would think of as tech. I thought the example of going from 130 days to five days, right, for permitting approvals. Yeah, for building permits, for sure. I mean, that takes out a massive amount of inefficiency from the industry, right? And it enables that very industry to then move faster. Instead of government, you know, as a blocker to so many of these things becomes an enabler. And I think it's that sort of that attitude about modernized, you know, customer focused or citizen focused that is the hallmark of what, you know, folks are doing now to make a difference. Well, thanks for coming in and sharing the insights. You're excellency, great to see you. One final question, take a minute to explain to the folks. What is the ministry of youth and sports affair? What's the charter? Are you going to add tech athletes to the mix now that we kind of defined that term? But take a minute to explain. Sure, sure, sure. So the vast majority of the population is under the age of 35. The ministry's mandate is to make sure that anybody within that constituency, their touch points are being managed in the right way. So our job, very, very simply, is to be effectively the change agent for them, number one, and number two, to protect their interests. So we're the ones that are negotiating regulations that come in, but what touch point really is relevant. I mean, we're negotiating new laws that impact youth when it comes to their trades, new laws that impact their youth when it comes to their rights. New laws. Arts, culture, or art, or whatever. Any touch points. So effectively, we're customer relations for youth, so our client relations for youth. So that's that from one perspective. With regards to sports, we're simply regulators. So what we're doing is we're moving from an operator model to a regulator model. So, and what we're trying to do is we're trying to create a sports industry. So instead of us focusing on the actual tournament itself only, we're looking at sports diplomacy, we're looking at sports industry, we're looking at human performance, and things like that. So any sectors that we can catalyze to grow in Bahrain that relates in any way, shape, or form to sports, whether it was medicinal development, technological development, regulations, or otherwise, that falls under ministry of youth in sports. You're charged with the whole individual across all spectrums, touch points. Exactly. So we're horizontal as opposed to vertical. You're actually great to have you on theCUBE, great topic, talk about it forever. We love sports, of course, on theCUBE. We love talking sports, Max. You're a tech athlete. I'm a tech athlete. I learned that today. You go from city to city at a home run everywhere you go. I'm looking for the next league to compete in. Guys, thanks so much for the insights. Cube coverage here at AWS Summit in Bahrain. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.