 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hello, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here covering AWS' International Public Sector virtual event. We have a great guest. The star of the program is Max Peterson, good friend of theCUBE, also vice president of AWS International for Public Sector. Max, great to see you. Thanks for coming on this virtual remote interview, CUBE interview. Hey, John, it's great to be back on theCUBE, even if it is virtual. Well, you know, we're not face-to-face. We have to go virtual, so theCUBE virtual, you got the Public Sector Summit virtual. This is the time of the year where normally we'd be out on the road in Bahrain, Japan, Asia Pacific, Europe. We'd be out on the summits, talking to all the guests and presenting the update on public sector. But we have to do it remotely. You know, a little bit of trade-off. The good news is with COVID, for at least you guys, it's a global media network. And with these remote interviews, public sector is seeing a lot more global activity. And that's what I want to get your thoughts on. What is the business update internationally for public sector? I'm sure that with COVID, the pandemic is seeing a lot of activity. How is the public sector business doing internationally? John, you know, you mentioned one of the silver linings of a pretty bad situation with the COVID pandemic. And that's been that it has meant that people have to be resourceful, governments have to be resourceful. And so there's been a tremendous amount of innovation. People have gotten used to now using modern cloud technology to support remote work and remote learning. Out of necessity, we've had to figure out how do we deliver far greater healthcare services using digital technology, telemedicine, digital social care, chime rooms. It really, in a nutshell, has been a tough six months for people, but a relatively busy six months for innovation and for IT, for the public sector customers. You know, I did an interview a few months ago for one of the award programs in Canada with Accenture had a customer, and this customer was a classic customer, oh, Amazon, you know, I'm not sure we do it all internally. He deployed AWS Connect in literally days that saved the lives of many of his countrymen and women by getting the entitlement checks out. And he was a glowing endorsement because he said with COVID-19, they were crippled. He said they stood up a call center and literally he was converted. That's just one example, again, that's Canada, of the kind of solutions that you guys are enabling with cloud to quickly respond to the crisis to use technology to solve other technology problems and also business problems. Can you give an example on the international front of where you're seeing some activity? Because this seems to be the same pattern we're seeing. People who have used in the cloud, we, theCUBE virtual, there'd be no CUBE, it wasn't for our cloud implementations, but this is an obvious, but I want to call it out, it's important, can you share some examples of people internationally using the cloud to get and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and delivering services? Yeah, in fact, John, we're focusing a lot on that at the Public Sector Summit Online that comes up here in October. Couple of quick examples. In fact, one of the top learnings is speed matters. And so we have Eve Curry from Australia who talks about social and healthcare and how they were able to get a complete digital suite up and running for supporting 5,000 elderly patients and over 3,000 employees in less than a week. And that included getting up and running a video conferencing and teleconsultation capability using AWS Chime. It involved getting up and running collaboration space for the remote workers using work docs and it involved setting up a complete call center on the cloud using Amazon Chime. And literally that was done in less than a week. Another example, a really ambitious example, which again is a testament to the innovation and the capability that AWS brings to customers in India. They had a number of telemedicine applications. They were available for a fee, but they didn't have a universal way to reach the vast population in India. And so when the pandemic hit, the organization that was responsible for the public health component was challenged to get a no-cost teleconsultation, hella medicine system up and running for outpatient services that could scale to reach a billion people. They did that in 19 days. They got the system up and running now. It hasn't gotten to a billion people online at one time, but they're right now doing 6,000 consultations a day with about 4,000 doctors and they're headed toward 100,000 consultations a day. So just to your point, speed and scale, we're seeing it across the board from our public sector customers. You know, it's just mind-boggling, just to kind of pinch myself from it in 19 days. It's crazy, right? I mean, crazy fast. If you throw it back to the 80s and 90s, when I broke into the business, you know, young gun, client server was all the rage back then. And if you wanted to do like a big app deployment oracle SAP, whatever, it was years. It was months just to do planning, right? I mean, think about the telemedicine example. 19 days, that's huge. I mean, just to scale is just off the chart. So I mean, if you're not a believer in cloud, I don't feel should be, should just go home and retire at this point because it's just obvious. The question I want to ask you specifically, because Teresa brought this up in my last interview with her and I want to ask you the same question is, what is AWS doing specifically to help customers? I know customers are helping themselves. You mentioned that. What are you guys doing to accelerate this? How are you helping? Have you guys changed a little bit? Can you just share what you guys specifically are doing to help customers pivot to not only solving it but having a growth strategy behind it? Yeah, John, that's a great question. Some of the things that we're doing are longstanding programs. And so customers from day one have had a need for skills and workforce development. We keep on doubling down on those programs. Things like AWS Academy, AWS Educate, our restart programs in different countries. So number one is we continue to help customers double down on getting the right cloud skills to enable a digital workforce. The second thing, in fact, if I can for just a moment, there is actually a section of the public sector online called the new workforce, which talks about both the digital skills that are required and then also some of the remote working skills that we need to help folks with. So workforce is a big one. The second one, and I'm super excited about this because we've opened up the opportunity for more customers around the globe to participate in our city on the cloud challenge. And that gives a great opportunity to showcase and highlight the innovation of public sector customers and win some AWS credits and technical assistance to help them build the programs. But I think one of the things I'm most proud about in the last six to nine months was when this pandemic struck and we listened to our customers about what they needed, we came out with something called the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative. And that was a program specifically aimed at providing technical assistance, AWS cloud credits, all two researchers to help them tackle the tough questions that need to be answered to help us deal with and then hopefully resolve the pandemic. So on the international front, and like I said earlier in the open, we would have been in Bahrain. That's a new region, only a couple of years old. Obviously the historic, there's some geopolitical things happening there, opening things up. That's been a very successful region. This is the playbook. Can you just give us an update on some of the successes in the different regions, Bahrain and then APAC and other areas? What's some of the highlights? Sure, John, one of the things that I think is super exciting is that all of these customers are developing new capabilities right now. One example from Egypt, they had to get literally an entire student population back to school when the pandemic hit. And so they quickly pivoted to bringing a online learning management system or LMS up on the cloud on AWS. And they have been able to continue to teach classes literally to millions of students there. We've seen that same sort of distance learning online education across the globe. Another example would be when countries needed to figure out how to be more effective in that sort of time-tested contact tracing process. So when a person has been found to have the flu or the illness, the subject illness, they typically have a lot of manual contact tracers that have to try to identify kind of where that person's been and see if they can then help to control the spread of whatever the disease is, COVID-19 in this case. We put together with governments across the world, with AWS partners across the world, again, in very fast order, automated systems to help governments manage this. Singapore is a super example. India is a massively scaled example, but we did it in countries across the globe. And we did it by working with them and the partners there to specifically respond to their needs. So everybody's case, while similar at a high level, was unique in the way that they had to implement it. You know, it's been a great ride, international, it's got us with COVID, you guys have a current situation, you guys are providing benefits and also the cloud itself, the customers to build those modern apps. The question I want to ask you, Max, as an executive at AWS, also you've been in the industry with public sector, pre-COVID, it's before COVID and it's after COVID, it's going to be kind of like that demarcation in the line in the society. It has become a global thing. I just did an event with Cal Poly as I was mentioning before we came on, small little symposium that would have been, you know, face-to-face, but because we did it virtually, it's now global, reinvents coming up, that's going to be essentially virtual, so that's going to be more global, less physical space-to-face. Everything is in, there's no boundaries. So how does that impact? How do you guys look at that? Because it impacts you, I guess, a little bit because there's no boundaries. Right, you know, John, I think this plays into what we were talking about in terms of people and governments and organizations getting used to new ways of working. And so some of our new workforce development is based around that, not just the digital skills and the cloud skills, a couple of the things that we've recognized, and by the way, it's different, but done well, there's new benefits. And so one of the things that we've seen is where people employ Chine, for instance, the video conferencing solution or solutions from our partners like Zoom and others. And people have been able to actually be more in touch, for instance, with elder care. There were a number of countries that introduced shielding that meant that people couldn't physically go and visit their moms and dads. And so what we've seen is a number of systems and care organizations that have responded and are helping the elderly to use this new tech. And it's really actually heartwarming to see those connections happen again, even in this virtual world. And the interesting thing is you can actually step up the frequency. And so you don't have to be there physically, but you can be there and interact and support with a number of these tools. I think one of the other big learnings that we've seen from many organizations and just about every public sector group has to work with their constituents on the phone. Of course, we've got physical offices, whether it's a hospital or an outpatient center or a social care center. But you always have to have a way to work on phones. What's happened during the COVID-19 pandemic is there's been surges where information needed to get out to citizens or where citizens literally rushed the phone lines to be able to get the most current information back. And the legacy call systems have been completely overwhelmed or inadequate. And we've seen customers launch the online call center in the cloud piece using Amazon Connect as their starting point, but then continuously innovating. And so starting to use things like Lex to be able to deliver a chat box function. In the US, for example, one of our partners, Smarttronics, was able to automate the welfare and social care systems for a number of different states to the point now where 90 plus percent of those calls get initially handled and satisfied using a chat box which frees up agents to deal with the more difficult inbound calls that they get. I got to ask you, where do we go from here? What's next for these organizations post COVID world? You know, if we're sitting at a cocktail party or sitting down having dinner or we're here talking remotely here, how would you explain to me what's next? Where do we go from here? And how do organizations take that next post COVID recovery and growth? What's your take? And John, I think that's a fantastic question to ask. Let me tell you what, we learn from our customers every day because we see them try and do new things. If I had to take my sort of crystal ball, I think we're in version one of figuring out how do we work in this new environment? I think there's a couple of key things that we're gonna see. Number one, resilience and continuity of service is not gonna be optional. Everybody is coming to expect that government, care, not for profits, education is gonna be able to seamlessly continue to deliver the core services irrespective of these world events or emergencies. And we see customers now really getting that, right? It used to take, you talked about it. Heck, you couldn't get a system up and running in 19 days. You'd be lucky if you cut a purchase order in 19 days. Citizens and constituents that aren't gonna accept that anymore, right? So that's one big change that I think is with us and we'll keep on driving cloud adoption. I think the next one is how do we start putting the pieces together in ways that make some of this invisible? And an example kind of starts with that example in the US with the partner that was building systems to help welfare and social care call centers operate smoother. But if you think about the range of AWS services and the building blocks that customers have, we'll find customers starting to create that virtual experience in a version 2.0 way where they tie the contact center into a chat box and into a transcription. Like for instance, being able to have a conversation with a parent and using a comprehend medical to actually get a medically accurate transcription. So the doctor can focus on that patient interaction and not on actually data capture, right? And then if that patient asks, well, G doc, could you give me more information about XYZ medication or about what a course of treatment sounds like? Instead of tying up a doctor's time, you can go and use a tool like Amazon Poly to then go text to speech and give all of that further rich information to that citizen. I think some of those things, same scenarios, right? How do we go from this very fast version one about O response to a more immersive, less tech evident capability that strings these things together that to meet kind of unique use cases or unique needs. Yeah, I think that's totally right. I think the 19 days, I'm blown away by that, but I think when you talk about agility, that was a cloud term, being more agile with your code, business agility has come on the scene. And then with business agility, I call business latency. And you went from years to months, months to days. And I think now as you get into the DEX versions, it's days to hours, hours to minutes, hours to seconds, because when you look at the scale of the cloud, some of the things we were talking about was going on a space force and globally around with space, latency, technically and business latency, this is the new dynamic. And it's going to be automation, AI, these are the, this is the new reality. I think COVID points that out. What's your reaction to that? And give a final message to the AWS international community out there on how to get through this and what you guys are doing. Yeah, John, I think your observation is, that increasingly, there needs to be a connectedness between the services that these public sector customers deliver. And so that connectedness can be in terms of making sure that a citizen who is on their life journey doesn't need to continuously explain to government where they're at, but rather, government learns how to create secure, scalable data stores so that they understand the journey of the citizen and can provide help through that journey. So it becomes more citizen-centric, I think. Another example is in the entire healthcare arena, where what we have found is that the ability to securely collaborate on very complex problems and complex data sets, like genomes, is increasingly important. And so I think what you'll find is you'll find, we're seeing it today, right? With customers like Genomics England and UK Biobank, where they're in fact creating these secure collaboration spaces so that the best researchers can work against these very important data sets in a secure yet trusted collaboration environment. So I think we're seeing much more of that. And I would say the third thing that we're probably learning from our customers is just how important that skills and workforce piece is. With the accelerated pace, we continue to see pressure on smart skills and resources that our customers need. Fortunately, we've got a great global partner ecosystem, but you'll see us continuing to push that forward as an agenda that will help customers with. So I guess my part in comment would be, how could it not be? I hope that the customers that attend the summit are from all over the world. I hope they find something that's useful to them in pursuing their mission and in their journey to the cloud. And John, it just is always a pleasure to join theCUBE. Thanks very much for the time today. Thank you, Max. Great call out. Just I'll call it out one more time to amplify the learnings and the workforce development starting younger and younger. The path to get proficiency is quickly. You can be a cloud computing, cyber security application, modern application development, all hot areas. The new playbook is cloud and it's all there online. And of course, Max, global footprint with the regions. The world has changed and it's going to be pretty busy time for you. We'll be covering it. Thanks for coming on. That's great. Thanks, John. Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. You're watching AWS Public Sector Summit, the international online event. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, your host. Thank you for watching.