 Hey everyone, welcome to this special CUBE series, Women of the Cloud, presented by AWS. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. This is a special segment. This is about strong mothers, leaders, and change makers. I've got two great guests here with me to talk through some great things about their career and some advice for you. Please welcome Trish Tate, the head of retail, CPG, travel and hospitality for West Enterprise at AWS. And Susanna Dyer is here as well, head of global alliances at Trend Micro. Ladies, it's so great to have you on the Women of the Cloud series. Thank you for joining me. Thanks for having us. Oh, my pleasure. Trish, let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience just a little bit of a snapshot into your current role. Absolutely. So I lead a team who focus on retail, CPG, travel and hospitality customers across the Southwest. All of our customers are enterprise. And so every day we wake up thinking about what our customers are trying to do and what their businesses are trying to accomplish, what problems they're trying to solve. And we work backwards from there to help them develop solutions that can really propel their business forward and enable them to achieve those outcomes. That AWS customer centricity always comes through in every conversation we have. Thanks for sharing Trish. Susanna, give us a little bit of your background at Trend Micro and some of the things that you're working on. Yeah, Elise, I've been working at Trend for almost nine years now. I lead our global alliances. And with that means all things AWS and Trend and some of our key partners, how we're working together around the world, doing great go-to-market strategies, co-selling and growing together as well as co-building together in innovative technology ways. Excellent. We're going to talk about some innovative technology trends and ideas for you guys later, but you guys are both not just women of the cloud. You're also moms. I won't bug you about how are you getting that work-life balance that seems to elude all of us. But I'd love to understand how being a mother has impacted your leadership style. Trish, we'll start with you and then Susanna, we'll go to you. Sure, absolutely. And thanks for the question. So I have a six-month-old. So a lot of uncharted waters for me in my household and it is a balance, right? So balancing it all, making sure that I'm still showing up for my team, my customers, my company, of course always doing the right thing. And I think what I've learned is, or what I joke about is that I've never taken a lunch, probably in my whole career, but sometimes you gotta block your calendar because there's just things that you have to do, like feed your baby when she's at this age. So it's been interesting to, I think overcome some of those things, learn some of those things. I think I'd be remiss if I didn't call out the fact that so many women that have come before me have really made the experience that I have as a mother in the work for so much easier. So you go into pretty much any business today and there is the mother's room, which enables you to have the privacy and the time and the relentless support that I have for my leadership team to make sure that I'm able to manage all the things that come with being a new mom. It has just been incredible and overwhelmingly, makes it easier, I guess, right at the end of the day. And I think in terms of how it's changed my leadership style, I'll say that I'm probably not always known to be the most patient person, kind of like, let's get stuff done, right? There's a lot to do. And so I've learned to be more patient, I think. And along with that, I think more empathetic as well. Understanding where other people are coming from is of course really important, not only so that you can relate to them, but so that you can empower them and build them up and motivate them and inspire them and enable them to be their best selves as a leader. And then I think finally at the same time, there's a lot less time. So I tell my team often, I care about you deeply and genuinely as a human, but at the same time, we have to get stuff done. So with that, I find that sometimes I'm probably a little bit more direct than I was in the past as a mother and with more limited time than I did previously. Well, you look incredibly rested for having a six-month-old, my goodness, but such great impact that it's had on your leadership style. Susan, talk to us a little bit about your role as a mother and how it's impacted your leadership style as well. Yeah, and I'm gonna, Trisha, I'm gonna play off of what you were saying. I also have a six-month-old and a three-year-old and recently coming back from maternity leave, it's definitely changed some things. I think time is the greatest gift we can give ourselves and to others. And I wanna always respect my team's time and that we're removing a lot of the fluff, right? We're being mindful of the time that we have, right? We're not having meetings just to have meetings. We're having purposeful time because the last thing I wanna do is take away that time from other people being with their families or time where I need to be with my family. And I think that's the other kind of key thing is being purposeful, right? With the time that we have, we're focusing on the time, on the tasks that we have at the time that we're in it. If we're having a team meeting, we're in it, we're focused. We're not multitasking in that case. Also, when I am going home or if I'm logging off, I'm gonna log off from that six o'clock to that eight o'clock time, it's my family time. I need that. I'm completely turning off my phone or just leaving it to the side and I'm taking that time and being purposeful with the moment that I'm in in order for me to say I'm being valuable, right? To my team and to my family too. And that's so important to be able to deliver value on both sides and to feel the value that you're delivering. Suzanne, I'm gonna think that you're gonna say yes, but would you think that that motherhood has actually made you better at your job and then Trish will go to you with the same question? 100%. I actually think, thought about this and it actually made me be more ambitious. I almost felt like now I have someone actually watching me, right? I almost had this motherhood as awakened more ambition, which is interesting. The stakes are higher, right? Like I now have a little group of people that are looking at me to say, wow, you can do hard things. And I feel responsible to be able to say, I can do hard things and so can you. That model of showing my kids what's possible is so inspiring to me more than anything else. I wanna keep doing more. It's almost the absolute. I love that. I love that it's really ignited your ambition. Trish, what about you? What are some of the ways that you would say being a mother has made me better at my job? Yeah, and I think similarly, I'll play off of Susanna there. I tend to, I guess like look at the world through her eyes, right? And so being able to realize that there's so much out there to be curious about and learn just constantly, right? I think that it really helps differentiate me being open to all of that. And then also what you said about purposely, I think about how is everything that I'm doing very intentional, right? Working to achieve some kind of outcome, whether it's helping develop my employee to get them to the next level, helping to enable my customer to reduce costs or grow profits or increase revenues through different monetization engines. And so I think combining those two areas, it absolutely, it makes me want to do better, right? As you called out so beautifully, they're looking up to us and showing them how we were able to achieve these great things and that they too can and do so with Grace, not always, but a lot of the times as it's been really eye-opening and honor. I think it's an honor to be able to be a mother and then also to lead a team and support our customers in the way that we do. I love that. I think you both probably role models to many adults in your career, but now it seems like you're feeling that role even so much more personally with your little ones who are watching. And as you said, I want them to see they can be anything that they want to be. There's this common misconception. We always talk about it with work-life balance, things like that. Women have to sacrifice ambition to have the flexibility that you've carved out for yourselves. I'm going to guess that your thoughts on that or as you said, you're even more ambitious. What are your thoughts on when you hear that misconception that, well, I can't be ambitious because I have to be flexible to be with my family? Well, I think it's a very wrong way of thinking. I absolutely think motherhood makes you a more well-rounded person, more empathetic to Trisha's point. I think it allows you to see things in a different perspective. I think it makes you a better leader because you're able to connect with people in a different way. You really have an attitude of this is my purpose and I'm doing things intentionally. I absolutely think motherhood has made me be even more intentional with where I'm going to go with my career. And you can't balance, you can't have it all sometimes. Some things go up, some things go down, but that's okay, we can still have ambition and we can still be able to be great role models for our kids. Absolutely, Trisha, what are your thoughts on that misconception that I mentioned? Because it sounds like both of you are really in sync with each other. You talked about how it's benefiting your leadership style, you're more patient, you've got more empathy, great qualities of a leader. But when people say ambition or flexibility, you can't have both, what do you say? There's a few things that come to mind and I'm actually kind of laughing a little bit because after I came back from maternity leave probably a month in, I was having a conversation with a mentor and I was like, I'm not doing enough, I haven't had these kinds of career development conversations with my leader, I need to be more direct about it. And what she said to me was give yourself grace. So I think you said it again, so beautifully Susanna where there's a right time, right? And of course we can always, for me personally, I seek to broaden my impact. I wanna always be close to the customers but how can I broaden the impact that I'm having, continuing to increase my kind of the span of what I'm able to see and learn and do from an employee perspective and development wise. And what comes with that is gaining a lot of experience, right? So I think that it was really great for this mentors, fantastic, just an incredible human to remind myself, to give myself grace that I kind of just came back right and take things as they come. So, I mean, it's an honor to be here today just having the ability to speak about these things because I think it's a good reminder that while we're going through these new experiences I'm still challenging myself in different ways, right? And just being able to even juggle the and work through or cruise through the uncharted waters that I'm achieving, it really is me gaining new experiences there. So sometimes I think it's important to take a step back and realize that while it may not be directly in your face that you're seeking a new role or having a specific development conversation around the things that you wanna do above and outside of your role, take a step back and realize that you still are getting exposed to those different kinds of things. And again, just give yourself grace, I think is important. And just because there may be a few months where you feel like you've slowed down if you will, right? That's not necessarily probably the case despite that that's how it feels. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you're on a different track than you originally were. And the sky's the limit. So let's go break those glass ceilings. I just reminded me, someone in my team said to me today, a young woman said, with my male leader, it always felt like his life was work. And I didn't know if I was gonna ever be able to be a mom while working. And I feel so inspired that we can do it. And she said, you can do it all. And I said, I can't do it all. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed and that's okay. That doesn't mean that we can continue to try to do our best. There's gonna be good days and bad days. We can still try to have it all, right? That it's okay, grant yourself some grace. It is possible to do it. I love that. Just like the cloud, it's a journey, right? There's no blueprint for it per se. I'm sure I imagine you both were going 100 miles an hour and then maternity leave ahead and you're trying to kind of readjust to your feet. I love, give yourself grace, be graceful with yourself. Have that empathy for yourself as well because clearly you're making a huge impact on your teams and those around you. I'd love to understand a little bragging moment here for each of you, Church, we'll go to you. What, some of the wins that you and your team have had recently that you're really proud of, what are some of the things that come to mind? Yeah, absolutely. So I feel so lucky I have such an incredible team, such incredible customers who are really looking to kind of innovate at that next level. So a lot of, like you said, a lot of them are on different journeys that I think everybody is looking at ways to embed artificial intelligence and machine learning into their current business applications and modernize those applications. There's a consistent theme of doing more with less, I would say across all of our customer base, especially with some of the economic headwinds and uncertainty that we're seeing. What we're also seeing a lot of is around how we're changing customer care. So I work with a lot of travel and hospitality customers and I'm sure if you've called into airlines, it's not always the best experience. As an example, most recently we had an airline who was able to adopt one of our customer care solutions. It's called Amazon Connect and they've been able to see such incredible changes to the way that they're able to serve their customers through making that kind of modernization and going towards a platform that's more data driven and really enables the customer to have a better experience when calling into an airline, when your flight get canceled and it can already be pretty stressful and anxiety type, anxious type of moment, anything that we can do there to help the agents on the backend have the data and the tools. So that's what the Amazon Connect solution really can do and provide that better customer experience. And then the other one I would say kind of along that same lines in terms of hospitality customers and from a guest experience, recently personalization is a big thing that we see, right? Like how would I walk into a place? Do they know who I am and what kind of drink I like? So at some of our casino properties, we've been able to implement geolocation solutions whereby it does just that, enables the casino property to understand who I am as a customer of theirs. And when I walk in within a few minutes, we're able to deliver the drink that I ordered last time without having to even have any interaction between the server and the customer. And those kinds of things I think go a long way in terms of improving the overall experience, when you're taking time out of the office, the more enjoyable that that time that you have away is can be really important. And so I feel really proud that we're able to make those kinds of impacts with our customers and really just change the experience all around. Delivering great customer experience, also delivering that personalized experience that you were talking about are table stakes for I think every business in every industry. So I love that you're having the direct impact on that. Susanna, talk to us about some of the things that your team and you've recently won on that you're like, this is awesome. You know, I actually, it's very similar, right? Doing less with more and what are we doing from a partnership perspective? So my job is all about partnering with AWS and partnering our technologies really, like what is the best from ours to AWS to our customers? How do we make things better? We're about to launch a kind of a new technology that will be working with AWS and Trend Migros product delivering an easy button for a customer to be able to deploy the right cloud formation templates and security at the same time. And more innovative is that we're actually working with one of our system integrators, a service company that is going to also be taking it to the next level where a customer is gonna be able to have the right AWS technologies, like services turned on to actually begin a mass migration, the security behind it, that's Trend Micro, and then the services from NSI. It's really had never been done before. It seems very simple, that easy button of having these trifecta, these three companies doing things together at the same time, integrated, helping customers to actually understand their journey and as they're migrating, that platform, I think is gonna be really, really special. We're in the middle of this transition and launching it internally here at Trend. Couldn't be more excited about taking it to the next level. Let's actually get customers started in the integration with the technology behind it. I think it's gonna be really awesome. And it's just gonna be a flywheel of innovation, I can tell, but what you're both doing is so impactful. Just so many different people, whether it's on the leadership side or the customer side, I'd love to wrap things up here in our conversation, kind of looking at your little ones as a future generation. What are some of the ways that you think about how we can continue to use technology to be innovative in ways that will positively impact those little ones and the future generation? Trish, we'll start with you. Awesome, thanks for the question. This is such an important one. I think the buzzword these days is what's happening with large language models or chat GPT is an implementation of a large language model. If you use Gmail, right, you can tab through your emails that pretty much knows what you wanna type before you're typing it. And I think it's really important that we are very responsible with how and where and how that type of technology is implemented for good. So I think when it comes to responsible artificial intelligence or responsible AI, I think we're gonna continue to see increased regulation around that and I'm looking forward to seeing what AWS is doing around that again, just to make sure that it's being used for good and some of the bad actors out there don't aren't implementing it in ways that it can be a detriment to society and the economy. And then I think it's top of mind for all of us is sustainability. So you've probably seen what AWS is doing specifically with the climate pledge, our commitment to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2040 which is about 10 years ahead of the Paris agreement. That is the, it's key for all of us and our young ones most importantly. So the more that we can be talking to our customers again about doing more with less, right? It's a consistent theme and I'm really proud. I think in so many ways that not only that we have the climate pledge but what we're doing to help our customers solution around sustainability and what we're doing from our data center's perspective and the goals that we have set forth for our company as a way to kind of set an example for others. Right. Those are great examples to set for others. Suzanne, take a cell. What are some of the things that excite you about innovative ways we can use technology to positively impact future generations? Again, I think Trish and I might've prepped at the same time thinking about this. So I know I first, I thought, man, what, when we start thinking about using AI responsibly and what does that look like for our future generations to be honest with you, Lisa, I think the future's still unwritten. I think that we're gonna see massive changes in the way that we do business. I think that we will see changes. I think we'll see different new companies emerging, new technologies emerging that go with it. And I, I'm like, what would my three-year-old son gonna be doing when he's graduating college? I'm like, I don't actually think I know that. And I don't actually think I can set the stage exactly what he's, what that looks like. What I do know is that the technology that we have today is definitely going to be transforming what 18 years time looks like when he's graduating college and whatnot. So I think it's embedded in our lives more than ever. It will continue to. I'm very curious to see how that goes. I'm happy that we're in the industry that we are in, right? Part of innovation and helping customers innovate more, think out of the box. I think we're in the right place for it. I'm excited to see what that looks like in the future. Excellent. Ladies, thank you so much for joining me on this great program, AWS Women at the Cloud. Not only are you women of the cloud, your mothers, your leaders, your change makers. We so appreciate you taking the time to really explain to us some of the great impacts that you're making. What excites you? How you've grown as a leader. I know we could keep talking, but I just want to thank you so much for sharing what you did today. Thank you. Thanks for having us, Lisa. Honored to be here. Such a pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching, and we'll see you next time.