 Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its partner ecosystem. Well, welcome back to our nation's capital, Washington, D.C., hosting this week the AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. You're alive here on theCUBE, which of course is the flagship broadcast at SoCon Angle TV, where my partner in crime, John Furrier, always likes to say we extract the signal from the noise. Tell me, John. That's right, we're here. Yeah, we are. In D.C. In D.C., and it's a little warm, it's a little toasty, inside but outside, especially 95 humidity. Jeff Raleigh could have tested that, just pulled it into town from Columbus, Ohio. Jeff, good to see you, the senior VP and GM of Cloud at Ellucian. So thank you for being with us, Jeff. Absolutely, John. John, happy to be here. You bet. So Ellucian, a leader in higher education software, we're talking a little bit about the company, 2,400 institutions around the world with which you work. Most of those, about 2,000 here in the U.S. Let's talk about that work, the nature of the work first, and then we'll jump in a little bit to about how they're a plane in the cloud these days. Sure, absolutely, happy to. So Ellucian's got a sole focus in higher education, so it's really the only industry that we serve. We serve the industry really from a software, enterprise software perspective. So that's really helping from an ERP perspective, HR finance, but really our bread and butter is the student system, and it's really the systems around helping students achieve success. As they go to a community college or go to a four year public or four year private, it's really about helping those students drive success and actually get to successful outcomes. And we do that with registration, with advisement, with recruiting system. So it has a full breadth of software that an institution needs in order to help a student successfully go through that process of getting a degree and then ultimately getting a job. Well, John and I could both relate to that. He's got a daughter who's transferring over to Cal Berkeley, going to be going to school there. I've got a niece starting at UNC Wilmington that I'm helping out. I love the registration help, so you and I need to talk about that. Absolutely. Well, the question is, how do you get the kids into the schools they want? Is there an actor or a trojan horse? Right, we can't manipulate that much. But you talk about your company, is data rich inside poor? Which I thought was an interesting way to kind of look at things that we have is this huge treasure trove of information and data. But yet, maybe there's somewhat of a disconnect in interpreting that data and then putting it to value, putting it to use. What are you seeing with regard to that in the higher education space? You know, I think John, it's a great question. It's actually a really big focus of ours in terms of unlocking that data. If you think about the systems that have been on campus for 30 years, right? You've got all kinds of information about the students that have attended, the classes that they've taken, how well they've succeeded, the types of advising that they've needed. But how do you unlock all of the rich information so that you can take that information, drive some insight, and then just drive better outcomes? We've been working on a platform, we call it Ethos. And what we've basically built is a new data model for higher education where we've looked at all of those different systems and we've basically harmonized to a new data model that really sits above all of those systems. And we begin now to extract all of that information out from those systems into a data model. It's really designed around bringing role-based or persona-based insight. And we call it role-based analytics that basically is designed around answering the top five to seven questions that all of the people that are on campus have. So if you're a registrar and you want to know, what classes should I be adding that I need extras of? Well, that's a tough question to answer. We unlock the answer to that through the Ethos platform and the new persona-based analytics that we're developing. Because when we sit down and we talk to presidents of a school or we talk to the provost, one of the things that they want is they want to know that the people that they have working on campus for student outcomes are getting access to the information that they need to do their jobs better. And so that's been a clear mandate from our customers to help them do a better job of using the information that they're collecting. How do you guys deal with the data science side of this? Because it's interesting is that you're using data aggressively, cloud's perfect for that. You got a lot of compute available. How are you guys taking that legacy environment and kind of putting overlaying on top a really high functional analytics system? That's a great question, John. So what we do is we enable all of our software, whether it be on-premise software, most of our customers still run a lot of their software on-premise. And what we've built for those systems is a set of RESTful APIs that we deliver wherever that software runs to push that data into an AWS cloud environment where we begin putting that data in the columnar databases that are really built and constructed to help get insight very, very quickly from that data. But the most important part of doing that is really sitting down and talking to the person that has the question to understand what's the question that you're trying to answer that you haven't been able to answer? And then building the visualization that they need that actually helps them answer that question. But we took it one step forward. When what we did is we basically said, but we know through our research that that first question really just always yields another question, which then yields another question. And so what we did is we built our heuristic capability into the analytic platform that based on the user, based on who they are, based on the role that they had at a school, and based on other people that look like them and act like them and have that role, the system begins to learn the questions that are being asked and then where are they navigating to? What are the next questions? So that we actually begin presenting the users, not just with the answer to the first question that they have, but actually to, we believe that now that you've got the answer to this, that this is where you're going to go next from an insight perspective, the next types of questions. So we begin to guide the users and that's really where that guided nature comes from. So what's the next question John's going to ask that? Well, let's pick up the whole cognitive computing thing. You know, the idea that, okay, predictive analytics or one thing of prescription analytics, also you've got the notion of recommendation engines, all kinds of cool things that are just sitting out there waiting to be applied. The question is, how do you get the data? That's the number one problem. That's a, you know, and that's a good one. So we've got one of the solutions that we have in our CRM portfolio is called Advise. And what we do with that product is we actually bring all of the student data. So we bring their attendance data, we bring their health records, we bring all of the grades that they have, and we then build cohorts where we have like students. And what we begin to do is we begin to build a predictive model to find students that are at risk. That, you know, based on these attendance patterns in these classes, we know that this set of students is likely to have a poor outcome. And so what we want to do is not just identify that, well, now they're at risk, but it's the predictive side of, well, what should you do? What is the actual intervention that you need to take that's going to drive a better outcome? So the solution actually takes all the data and does two things. First, it identifies who are the students that we want to be working with. Could be at risk, could be hypos, right? Could be high potential students that we want to accelerate. But then it's about driving the actual actions and the interactions with those students. It's not just about identifying, well, Johnny's going to be in trouble. It's, well, okay, what should we do for Johnny to help him get out of trouble? And so it's both sides of that. So it is about pulling all of the data, which means you need to understand where the data lives. We have an advantage there over, pretty much everybody else in higher education because those 2400 institutions that we have, right? They are running a massive amount of our software from a portfolio perspective. So we know where the data is, so we know how to go out and get it. And then if you look at our partner ecosystem, we have over 130 partners that also serve higher education with us. And we know what data they have and we are enabling all of those partners to leverage the Ethos platform to be able to share that data, both from an integration and interoperability perspective, but also to feed that cloud analytics solution as well. What are the cool things you're doing with AWS? Obviously, they pretty much run the table on public cloud. We see that numbers there. They're in the chapter of their company or divisions, practically a company. I call it the team period. They're going into the enterprise years. Gov now has been really growing. It's like reinvent size. It's getting to that level. What's the impact that that's having? And what are some of the things that you're doing with AWS inside the public sector that's notable? That's a great question. I think one of the big things is we have a really, really strong go-to-market partnership with AWS. So, and I say the go-to-market side because we've had a really strong technical partnership with them for many years where we've been working with them as they've developed new services and we've been able to leverage those services to build micro-applications, to build elastic applications, all of that. And that's great from a technical perspective but now it's about bringing all of that to market. And so we have a very strong joint partnership with AWS. How many years has it gone back? Let's see, about two and a half, three years. So our enterprise agreement is two and a half years old. We were doing work with them before that. So, but it's about two and a half years old and when I look at that, we deploy all of our cloud applications solely on AWS. So they are the sole cloud provider for us. We've expanded our cloud offering outside of the United States. We're in Dublin. We have a data center in Sydney, Australia and we are just expanded into their new data center in the Eastern Canada area in Montreal. And that's helped us from a go-to-market because what they bring for us is they bring that credibility of delivering cloud infrastructure. We bring the credibility of delivering higher education solutions that solve specific problems that only exist in higher education. It's that combination when you go to markets basically to say that the world's leading infrastructure cloud provider partnered with the world's leading solution provider in higher education. That's an unbeatable solution for us. So I've got to ask you the question that people might ask. Hey, I've not been following. I have not been following AWS public sector. See Wall Street Journal articles, they're killing it, blah, blah, blah. How would you describe their current state of innovation, their current presence in the public sector market as of right now? Yeah, and I think the lens that I really have is really around that higher education, right? So public, community colleges, public four-year schools and they are highly focused on that. They have a dedicated team of people that are just focused on higher education. So they work with us kind of from a joint perspective and I know that my cloud business that I'm responsible for, it is the fastest growing part of Ellucian today. So in June of 2016, we actually surpassed. So from a growth perspective, we started growing much faster than the on-premise side of our business and that's in large part because of what AWS has enabled us to do. So from a training perspective, from a sales motion perspective, from a marketing and positioning perspective, right? It's a big focus for them. Would you consider them like, people with the perception of them would be, they're getting traction, they've cleared the runway, they're cruising altitude, where are they in the mind-share of higher ed? Oh, I think, I definitely think they've cleared the runway, they are clearly going past that 10,000 foot and up there, it's the, for us, one of the main reasons we chose AWS was that factor that they had already had traction, right? They were well-known and well-understood and that really helps us. Prior to that, we were doing a co-location where we were managing a bunch of infrastructure and stuff. That was a hard sell because, let's face it, we're software people, we're not infrastructure people. When we started bringing AWS to the table and basically talking about that's where we deploy, that took a lot of questions around scale, security, elasticity, right? And it basically put it all to rest. So we no longer have to contend with those questions because AWS is well-known in the higher education space. So it really works well for us. So when you sit down with a new client, a new perspective client, the two of you, right? You come in with this great resume and I think this is what's kind of interesting to me. Universities is these fountains of innovation and creative thinking, IT maybe not so much, you know? Because it's very institutional, right? There's a lot of legacy baggage they're bringing along. So what are the impediments that you run into in terms of talking to folks who might be not doubters because maybe a little resistant to change or maybe have a little change aversion? I mean, how do you go about bringing them along on that journey? Yeah, I think that's a great, what's interesting in terms of higher education is there's actually a couple things that are happening that really help us with that, that are happening. So, but to answer the first question, John, which was, you know, when we get into that kind of, not really a bad one, we get into that dialogue like, well, I'm not really sure that moving into the cloud is the right thing. There's an analyst, you know, that covers higher education. She's made a statement that basically is by 2020, a no cloud policy on campus is going to be much like a no internet policy on campus. Just not going to be a thing. And a lot of that is because a lot of providers are only building cloud solutions. That's all you're going to have access to. One of the things that's happening in higher education is in the IT space particularly, they're having a hard time finding those IT professionals because higher education isn't seen IT-wise as a sexy place to go. And so, a lot of those people that have been working in higher education for 25, 30 years, they're reaching that retirement age. And so, the- The mainframe guys. Right, the mainframe guys, the, you know, the union guys, right? And they're, it's, where do you go find, right, replacements for those? And so, they're recognizing that, okay, well that's going to be a problem for us. And, right, there's, you know, a lot of the infrastructure. On-premise infrastructure's getting old. So, is it, is it makes sense to put that capital investment into infrastructure or, I got other capital investment for research, right? And research equipment that I'd much rather put, if I'm a president, I'd much rather put the money there. So, that also leads to, right, an easier conversation around that journey to cloud, that journey of taking your enterprise systems and moving them to cloud environments. The other thing that we find is, the conversation is never really around cost savings. What it's really around is the redeployment of those IT resources to be better business partners, to be business, right, analysts, to be people that can actually be change agents at the university to bring about change, because they're no longer managing, right, operating systems or, right, network patches or security patches. They've, they've offloaded that to us and we've offloaded part of that work to AWS. Well, we appreciate the perspective. Like you said, it sounds like you've got quite a corner on the market. 2,400 partners, if you will, out there, many of those overseas, so congratulations on that front. Thank you. We should continue the success and thanks for joining us on theCUBE, first time, I believe, right? Yep, first time. We have rookies across the board. Now you're now a CUBE alumni. Yes. Appreciate it, thank you guys. Looking forward to having you back. Thanks, John, John, appreciate it. I appreciate it. Back with more from Washington, DC, here at the AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. You're watching live on theCUBE.