 Welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS to reinvent 2021 live in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, pleased to be here in person. We are actually with AWS and its massive ecosystem of partners running one of the industry's largest and most important hybrid tech events of the year. We've got two live sets, over 100 guests, two remote studios. I'm pleased to welcome two guests from Lido's here with me next. Derek Pledger is here, the VP and Director of Digital Modernization and David Child, the Director of Cloud Capabilities. Derek and David, welcome to the program. Thanks for having us. Great to be here in person, isn't it? Absolutely, last year we missed out. So hopefully we've got to get it all in this week. Exactly, and well this is day one and the amount of people that are in here, there's a lot of noise in the background, I'm sure the audience can hear it, is really nice. AWS has done such a great job of getting us all in here nice and safely. So let's go ahead and start. Lido's coming off a very strong Q3. When we look at the things that have happened nearly all defense and classified customers are engaged in digital modernization efforts. We've seen so much acceleration of that in the last 20 months. But let's talk about some of the current challenges, Derek, that customers are facing across operations, sustainment with respect to the need to modernize. Sure thing. So over the past two years, we spent the better part of all that time trying to really figure out what are our customers hardest problems? And that's across the health vertical, the DOD vertical, the Intel vertical, you name it, we spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. And we kept coming up on three reoccurring themes. One, which is the explosion of data. There's so much data being generated across our customers' environments. There's not enough human brain power to deal with it all, right? So we need to be able to apply technology in a way that reduces the cognitive burden on operators who must do operations and sustainment to get to a business outcome. The second one, and most importantly for us, is advanced cyber threats. We've all heard about the colonial pipeline hack. We've heard about solar winds. The scary part about that is, what about the hacks that we don't know about? And that's something that here at LIDOS, we're really focused on applying technology, cyber, AIML, in a way that we can detect when someone's in our environments or in our customer environments, then we can obviously do some remediation and get them out of our environment so mission operations are not compromised. And then lastly, customer environments are heterogeneous. You have cloud, you have on-premise infrastructure, you have edge devices, IoT devices. It's very difficult to be able to do management and orchestration over all these different devices, all the different platforms that are out there. So working in console with AWS, we build a solution to be able to do just that, which we'll talk about a little later. David, anything else that you want to hop on? Talked about the explosion of data, the cybersecurity landscape changing dramatically and the customers needing to be able to modernize and leverage the power of technology. Yeah, so our customers, we have basically three areas that we see our customers having challenges in. And one of them, once they get to the cloud, they don't have the transparency on cost and usage, right? When you get the engineers are excited, the mission is exposed with extra activities, but our customers don't have a sense on where the cost is going and how that relates to their mission, right? So we help them figure out, okay, your cost is going up, which is fine because it's applying to your mission and it's helping you actually be more successful than before, right? And the other area is they need a multi-platform strategy that doesn't impact their existing missions, right? They don't have the practicality or the funding that's required to just rip and replace everything. You can't do that. You have to maintain your mission. So you have to maintain about a lot of critical capabilities that they already have, but at the same time, figure out how am I going to add the extensions and the new capabilities, right? And we have certain ways that we can do that to allow them to start getting into the cloud, leveraging a lot of the additional capabilities that they never had before, but maintaining the investment that they've done in the past years to maintain their mission success, right? And then the third is skill, upskilling. So we found that a lot of people have a hard time once we move them into AWS. Specifically, their operational duties and things change, and there's a big gap there in terms of training, getting familiar with how that impacts their process and methodology, and that's where we help them a lot, how to modify that and revolution and how they do that stuff. That's excellent that upskilling is critical as things are changing so dramatically. And we have, you talked about data and the cybersecurity changes, Derek, and every company, every branch of federal is probably a data company or data organization, or if it's not, it has to become one. But the cyber threats are crazy. The things that have been going on in the last 20 months, the acceleration of ransomware, ransomware is a service. You talked about colonial, like we only hear about the big ones, but how many, it's no longer a, will we get hit by ransomware or will we be hacked? It's when. Talk to me about some of those challenges and also the need to be able to deliver real-time data as real-time missions are going on and that real-time is now no longer a nice to have. Right, so it's a great question. One of the things that I'll say is there's some studies out there that says 75% of the computing that will be happening over the next 10 years will be at the edge, right? So we're not going to be able to go at the edge, collect all this data, ship it back to a centralized way to process it. We're not going to be able to do that. What we have to do is take capability that may have been clouded able, push that capability to the edge, whether that be AIML, it could be your mission applications and we need to be able to exploit data in near real-time which allows us to make mission-critical decisions at the point of need. There's not going to be enough time to collect a big swath of data, move it back across bandwidth that is temporarily constrained in many cases. We just can't do it that way. So I think moving as much capability to the edge as possible in order for us to be able to make an impact in near real-time, that's what we need to do across all of our verticals, not just DOD, but on the healthcare side too, the Intel side, you name it, we've got to be able to move capability as far forward as possible. And we're, Derek, sticking with you for a minute, where are those verticals with respect to embracing that, adopting that, being ready to be able to take on those technologies? Because culturally, I can imagine, legacy, history, organizations, this changes heart. Changes heart, and one of the strategies that we've tried to implement within that context is that the legacy systems, the culture that is already out there, we're not just going to be able to turn all of that off. We're going to have to make sure that the new capabilities and the legacy systems coexist. So that's one of the reasons that we have been approached where we use microservices, very much API-driven, such that a mission-critical system that may have been online for the last 20 years, we're not just going to turn it off, but what we can do is start to build sidecar capabilities, microservices, to extend that capability of that system without rebuilding it. We can't build our way out of all the technical debt. What we can do is figure out how do we need to extend this capability to get to a mission need and build a microservices that's very thin, that's very lightweight, and that's how you start to connect the dots between your mission applications, the data, the data centricity that we talked about, and other capabilities that need access to data to be able to effectuate a decision. You make it sound so easy, Derek. It's certainly not easy. I'm sure it's not easy at all. But in working with AWS, we really have taken this forward and we're really deploying similar capabilities today. So it's really the way that we have to modernize. We have to be able to do it step by step, strangle out the old as we bring in the new. Right, so David, let's talk about the AWS partnership, what you guys are doing as the critical importance of being able to help the verticals modernize at speed, at scale, in real time. Talk to me about what Lidos and AWS are doing together. So we work with AWS very closely. For every engagement we have with our customers, we have AWS as our side. We do the reviews of the architecture and their approach. We take into account the data strategy of the organization along with their cloud. Because we found that you have to combine their cloud and their data strategy because of the volumes of data that Derek talked about, right, that they need to integrate. And so we come up with a custom strategy and a roadmap for them to adopt that without, like Derek said, deprecating any old capabilities that currently have and extending it out into the cloud. So those areas are what we strive to get them through. And we talk a lot about the digital enterprise and how that is, for us, from Lidos' point of view, we see that as building an API ecosystem for our customer, right? Because the API is really the key. And if you look at companies like Twilio that have an API first approach, that's what's allowed them to integrate very old technology like telephones into the new cloud, right? So that approach is really the unique approach that Lidos is taking with our customers for to see the success that we've seen. Well, can you tell me, Dave, it's taking with you for a minute about upscaling. I know that AWS has a big focus on that. They've got a restart program for helping folks that were unemployed during the pandemic or underemployed. But upscaling, as we talked about during this interview, is incredibly important as things change, are changing so quickly. Is there any sort of upscaling kind of partnerships that you're doing with AWS that you can- Oh, absolutely. Talk to me about this. So as a partner, we ourselves get a lot of free upscaling and training as a AWS Premier Partner. But also with our customers, we are able to customize and build specific training plans and curriculums that is targeted specifically for the operators, right? They don't come from a technology background like we do, but they come from a mission background. So we can modify and understand what they need to learn and what they don't really need to worry about so much and just target exactly what they need to do so they can just do their day-to-day jobs and their duties for the mission. That's what it's all about. Derek, can you share an example that you think really speaks volumes to LIDIS and AWS to help customers modernize? One thing I like about AWS is that the partnership is what we describe as a deep technical partnership. It's not just transactional. It's not like, hey, buy this X-Services and we'll do this. I have a great example of this year where we kicked off a pilot with an Army customer and we actually leveraged AWS ProServe. So we were literally building a proof of concept together. So in 90 days, what we did was get the customer to understand we're moving more to native AWS services, EMR to be more specific, that you can save money on tons of licensing costs that you otherwise would have had to pay for. After the pilot was over, we recognized that we will save the government $1.2 million and they have now said, yes, let's go AWS native, which is a methodology that we still want to stamp out and use continually because the more and more that you adopt in native services, you're going to be able to move faster. Because as soon as you deploy a system, it's already legacy. When you start to do the native services as things, more services come online, we're sort of their gluer to make sure those things that are coming, the services that our AWS are deploying out, we then bring that innovation into our customer environment. So saving the government $1.2 million is a big deal for us. It's huge and I'm sure that's one of many examples of significant outcomes that you're helping the verticals achieve. Absolutely, one of our core focuses. That's excellent. And also to do it so quickly in 90 days to be able to show the Army, a significant savings is a huge to Lighthouse and to AWS. David, talk to me a little bit about, from a partnership perspective, how do you guys go into joint organizations together? I imagine one of the most important things is that transparency from the verticals perspective, whether it's DOD or Health or Intel, talk to me about that kind of unified partnership and what is the customer and customer experience? I imagine one team. Yes, so we go into, we engage with our AWS counterparts at the very beginning of an engagement. So they have their dedicated teams, we have our dedicated teams and we are fully transparent with each other what the customers are facing and we both focus on the customer pain points. What is really going to drive the customer? And that's how we sort of approach the customer. So the customer sees us as a single team. We do things like we'll build out what we call the well architect framework or wafer for short, right? And that allows us to make sure that we're leveraging all the best practices from AWS from their clients on the commercial side and we can leverage that into the government, right? They can get a lot of learnings and lessons learned that they don't have to repeat because some of the commercial companies who are ahead of us have done the hard learning, right? And we can incorporate that into their mission and into their operations. That's critical because there isn't the time, right? I think that's one of the things that Panda has taught us is that there isn't, like we talked about real-time data, there is no longer a nice to have, but even from a training and from the deployment perspective that needs to be done incredibly efficiently with, we're talking about probably large groups of people I imagine with LIDOS folks, AWS folks, and the verticals. So that coordination between, I imagine, what are probably two fairly culturally aligned organizations is critical. Yeah, one of the things that we put in place is this idea of bad-list environment. So that means you could be a LIDOS person, you could be an AWS person. There's no badge. We're just in there, we're here to do good work to bring value to a customer, and that's something that's really fantastic about a relationship that we do have. So every week we are literally building things together and that's what the government, that's what the public sector folks expect. No one's not going to own it all. You have to be able to work together to be able to bring value to our customers across all the verticals that we serve. I like that bad-list environment. That's critical for organizations to work together harmoniously, given there's, as the data explosion just continues, as does the edge explosion and the IoT device explosion, more and more complexity comes into the environment. So that bad-list environment, I mean, David, from your perspective, is really critical to the success of every mission that you're working on. Yeah, I mean, I think the bad-list approach is critical without it. The existing teams have a hard time building that trust and feeling like we're part of that team, right? Trust is really important in mission success. And so when we enter a new arena, we try to build that trust as quickly as we can, show them that we're there to help them with their mission and we're not really there for anything else. So they feel comfortable to share the really deep pain points that they're not really sharing all the time, and that's what allows Lido specifically to really be successful with them because they share all their skeletons and we don't judge them, right? We say, okay, here's your problems, here are some solutions, and here are the pros and cons, and we figure out a solution together, right? It's a really built-together sort of mindset that makes it successful. Togetherness is key. Last question, guys, what are some of the things that attendees can learn and feel and see and smell from Lido's this week at ReInvent? You want to take that one, David? Yeah, so with Lido's, we're around, we have various custom processes with AWS. Because of our peer partnership, we have the MSSP that we just got as a launch partner. So there's a lot of interaction we have with AWS. Anytime that AWS sees that they're an opportunity for us to talk to a customer or talk to a potential vendor, they'll pull us in. So if you guys come by their booth and you need to talk to an SI, they'll pull us in and we'll have those conversations. Excellent, guys, thank you so much for joining me talking about Lido's AWS, what you guys are doing together and how you're helping transform government. You make it sound easy, like I said, Derek, I know that it's not, but it's great to hear the transparency with which you guys are all working. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Very appreciate it, thank you. My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in global live tech coverage.