 Live from Washington D.C., it's Cube Conversations with John Furrier. Hello everyone, welcome to the special exclusive Cube Conversations here in Washington D.C. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, here at Amazon Web Services Headquarter, World Headquarters for Public Sector Summit in Arlington, Virginia. Our special guest is Trisha Davis Muffet, who's the Director of Marketing for Worldwide Amazon Web Services. Thanks for joining me. So we see each other at Reinvent and Public Sector Summit, but you're always running around. You've got so many things going on. You've got big responsibility here. You guys are running hard and you've got a great culture at Theresa and team. Competitive, like to have fun, don't like to lose. What's it like being a marketer for the fastest growing, hottest product in Washington D.C. and around the world? Yeah, I mean it's really been amazing. When I came here, I kind of took a leap of faith on the company because it's four and a half years ago that I came and so I literally accepted the job before we had even gotten our first FedRAMP approval. So I wasn't entirely sure that this was gonna be the place to go to for technology for the government, but I really loved the way that we were helping the government innovate and save money, of course. I think most of us who are in public sector have a passion for citizens and for making government better. And so that's really what I saw in Theresa and her team, that they had such a passion to do that and that the technology was gonna help the government really improve the lives of citizens. So it's been great. One of the things that's been amazing is the passion that our customers have for our technology. I think they get a little taste of it and they go, wow, I can't believe what I can do that I thought was impossible before. And so I love seeing what our customers do with the technology. Some people think it might be easy to be a marketer for Amazon, but if you think about it, you have so much speed in your business. You have a cult of personality in the cloud addiction or cloud value, the addiction to the outcomes that are happening. And we're a customer, everyone kinda knows, that's pretty biased on it. We've seen the success ourselves, but you guys have a community. Everywhere you go, you're seeing Amazon as they take more territory down. Public Cloud originally now enterprise and public cloud, public sector enterprise, public cloud. Each kind of wave of territory that Amazon goes into, Amazon Web Services, there's a huge community. And so that's another element. I mean, public sector summit last year, I mean, it felt like a reinvent. I think so this year is gonna be bigger. Yeah, we had 6,500 plus people attend last year just in the Washington DC area. And we've also expanded that program now and we're taking our public sector summit specifically for government, education, and nonprofit around the world. So this year we'll be in Brussels, in Canberra, Australia. We have great adoption in Australia as well with the government there. In Singapore, Ottawa. So we're really expanding quite a bit and helping governments around the world to adopt. So that's a challenge. How are you gonna handle that? Because you guys have always been kinda with summits. Do you co-tail summits? Do you go separate? Yeah, no, we go separate. So we actually have the public sector summits. We take the experience of our technology to government towns that wouldn't typically get a summit. So for instance, here in the United States, of course, San Francisco and New York, there's a lot of commercial businesses. So we have our big summits there. But there's not as much commercial business here in Washington DC. So really, public sector takes the lead here. And then we focus on some of the things that really are most important to our public sector customers. Things like procurement and acquisition. Things like the security and compliance that's so critical in the government sector. And then also, we do a really careful job of curating our customers because we know that our government customers wanna hear from each other. They wanna hear from people who are blazing a trail within the public sector. They don't necessarily wanna hear about what we wanna say. They wanna hear what their peers are doing with the technology. And so last year, we had over 100 of our public sector customers speaking to each other about what they were doing with the cloud. And I find that's impressive. I would actually comment on theCUBE that week that it's interesting you let the customers do the talking. I mean, that's the best ultimate sign of success and traction. Yeah, and the great thing is, I've worked in other places in the public sector and government customers can be kinda shy about talking about what they're doing. They're very motivated to just keep things going, calmly, quietly, get their jobs done. But I think- Well, it doesn't help, I mean, it doesn't hurt when you have the top guy at the CIA say the best decision we've ever made. It's the most innovative thing we've ever done. Yeah. I mean, talk about being shy. Yeah, yeah. That's the CIA, by the way. That's the CIA. And we've also had, I mean, people like NASA JPL have been very outspoken. And Tom Soderstrom said that it was conservatively one-one-hundredth of the cost of what it would have been if he had built out the infrastructure himself to build the infrastructure for his Mars landing. So, I mean, that kind of- But you have to keep giving. I mean, you get lower prices. Okay, let's change gears. Because here you got a couple things that I've observed to every reinvent and kind of being a customer. And I think I've used Amazon. First came out as an entrepreneur. And when EC2 had no URL support. That's shown my age. But here's the thing. You guys have enabled customers to solve problems that they couldn't solve in the past. You mentioned NASA and a variety of others. Links of compute. But you guys are also in public sector, specifically, are doing new things, new problems that no one's ever seen before. In society, entrepreneurship, diversity and inclusion, education, nonprofits. I mean, you don't think of GovCloud in public sector and think nonprofits, education. So it's kind of, you have these sectors, but they're coming together. This is a new phenomenon. Can you talk and explain the dynamics behind that and the opportunities? Sure. I mean, I love to hear the stories of what our customers are doing when they really are tackling a problem that no one had thought of before. So, for instance, at Reinvent this year, one of our public sector customers who spoke was Thorn. And they are using AI to crawl the dark web and help find people who are trafficking children in human trafficking. And that's a great use of AI. And that's the kind of thing. It also helps our public servants because it helps to make police officers' jobs more effective. So, of course, we know that police officers is never enough police officers to go around. There's never enough detectives to look into everything that they need to. And this makes them so much more effective to make the world a safer, better place. I also love some of the things about educational outcomes. So Ivy Tech Community College is one of our great community college customers. And they're using Big Data Analysis to put together all of the different data sets that they have about their students and identify who might be at risk of failing a class 10 days into the semester so that they can help intervene with those things. When was that class when I needed it? I know. I mean, it's really... I'm gonna say, hey, homework time. Yeah, I mean, it really is looking at, you know, what kind of issues that they're having very early on with attendance, with different behavioral things. You had a great example at re-invent with the California Community College system. That was a very interesting one. He was up there bragging like with everybody's business. Yeah, yeah. And I think the community colleges, that really goes into this idea of we're trying to expand opportunity for a wide range of people. So, you know, you might think of computer scientists as, okay, that's gonna be all the Carnegie Mellon and Stanford and MIT people. And of course, you know, those are great contributors to computer science. But the fact is that computer science is so critical in so many aspects of life and in so many different kinds of careers. And we know that one of the limiters to our own growth is gonna be the talent that we have available to take advantage of the technology. So we've been really working hard to expand opportunity for a wide range of people so that any smart person with an idea can be using our technology. So that's part of what's behind building the AWS Educate Program, which is a program to offer free computer science training to any university student or college student anywhere in the world. So it's a program you guys are doing. This is a program we're doing. It's slow down. Now rewind. It's, what's it called again? AWS Educate. And it's a program that offers free credits to use AWS to any student who's enrolled in any kind of university or college anywhere around the world. That's a gateway drug to cloud computing. Absolutely. I mean, free resources. Yeah, and we're giving them training paths. So they can spin up an instance so they want to write some code, hello world or whatever they want to do. And they can take different paths and learn, okay, I want to learn a data science pathway. So I'm going to go that way. I want to learn a websites pathway and they can go through things and build a portfolio of projects that they've actually built. So can they tap into some of the AWS AI tools too? They can tap into a wide range of tools and they have different levels of tiers of credits that they get. So it's a really great program to really open up cloud computing. And is there any limitations on that? Is it, what grade levels is it college and above? Actually, at re-invent, we just opened it up to students 14 and above. Beautiful. Yeah. That's awesome. And then we also have a program. How do they prove they're a student of me? Well, having a school, an EDU email address or their school being registered through the program. Okay. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. And then we also have another program called We Power Tech. And that really is a program to help open up the talent pool again to women, to underserved communities, to people of different ethnic backgrounds who might not see themselves in technology because they don't see themselves as computer programmers on TV or whatever. Or they don't see their peer group in there or some sort of, it might be an inclusion issue or diversity issue. Right. And we're looking at the, if you take Educate and We Power Tech, we're looking at that full pipeline of talent all the way from kids who are deciding, should I pursue computer science or not all the way through to professionals and getting them to try to stay in technology. So you guys are legit on this. You're not gonna just check the box and focus on a narrow thing. You still have a lot of companies do that where they go, oh, we're targeting young girls or women. You guys are looking at the spectrum broader. Yeah. And we're really looking at different communities and helping people to find their community and technology so that they can find supportive networks and also find people to mentor them or find people to mentor who are, you know, elsewhere. There are problems that right now in today's culture and online culture to find peers and friends and to do work like this because I mean, it just doesn't seem to me that there's been any innovation in online message groups. It seems like so 30 years ago. Yeah, I think it is tough and I think there are some things that we're trying to break through. For instance, a lot of the role models out there are the same people over and over again, right? So we're trying to find new role models, and we find that through our customers. We find customers who are doing interesting work and we're trying to cultivate their voice and help put them on stage. New voices because there's new things, machine learning, AI, these are new disciplines, data science across the board. Yeah, and one of the things that I love about the technology is it really has a democratizing effect, right? If you have an idea, you can make that idea happen for very little money with just your ingenuity and, you know, your ability to stick to it, right? So I'm gonna ask you the hard question. Yeah, go ahead. Shouldn't be hard for you, but Amazon is gritty. It's been called gritty by me, hustling, but they're very good with their money. They don't really waste a lot in marketing. Yeah, they're frugal. Very frugal, but they're very efficient. So I gotta ask you your favorite gorilla marketing technique, because you guys do more with less, right? We do. You know, I mean, once been criticized on Wired Magazine, I remember reading it years ago about they were comparing the swag bag to reinvent the Google, which gave out phones, and it was kind of like typical reporter. But my point is, you guys spend your money on education to engineers, you don't skimp on that, but you might not put the flair onto an event, but now you guys are doing it, but back then. Well, no, I think there are two things. So one of them is the aesthetic of our events, right? We typically do have a very stripped down aesthetic, and we've made frugal look cool. So I think that's one of the things that I learned when I came here was, you know, go ahead and have the concrete floor and put quotes from customers there instead of paying to carpet it, right? So don't waste money on things that don't add value. That's one of the core tenets of what we do in marketing. Get a better band instead of the rug. Exactly, exactly. You guys have always had great music. We do always have great music. Trisha, tell me about your favorite program or project. You've done a lot over the years. Pick your favorite child. What's your favorite? A lot of great stuff going on, do you have a favorite? I think that my favorite is probably the City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge, which is something we've done every year for the last four years. And we really went and asked cities, tell us what you're doing with our technology, because we weren't sure what they were doing, because it's not very expensive for cities to run on us. And we found that they were doing incredible things. They were doing water monitoring in their cities to help improve the quality of life of their citizens. They were delivering education more effectively. They were helping their transportation run in a more effective way. New York City Department of Transportation was doing really cool citizen-facing apps to help them manage their transportation challenges. And also cities all around the world. We've had people put in things about garbage management in Jerusalem and about lighting management in a Japanese city. I mean, we've had all kinds of really interesting stories come out. And I just love hearing what the customers are doing. And this year, we added a dream big category where we said, if you had the money, what would you do with technology in your city? And we've been really thrilled to be able to offer grants and fund some of those things to help cities get started. That's awesome. Not only is it engaging for them to engage with you through the program, it's inspirational. I mean, the use cases are everything from IoT to every computer. And we've also had partners submit as well. And we've learned about things like parking applications that cities are putting in place to help their citizens find better parking or all kinds of really interesting, how to keep track of the trees and do a tree census in their cities, things like that. Maybe I'll borrow that and give you credit for it. Someone has a cube question. What would you do with yet unlimited money? Exactly. Well, the great part is that most of the cities find out that they can do what they want to do with very little money. They think it's going to be millions of dollars. And then they realize, oh my gosh, it's going to be hard for me to spend this $50,000 grant because it doesn't cost that much. That's awesome. And you've got a big event coming up in June. Public sector summit again. Any preview on that? Anything you can share? I'm sure it's a lot of things in the up in the air. A lot of really cool things. We're very excited to have some of our great customers on stage again. We're also, this year, going to have a pre-day where we're going to feature air and space workloads on AWS. So that's going to be really interesting. I think we're going to have Blue Origin there. And we're going to talk about what it's going to take to get to the next planet. Get to bring this crew there. And certainly, that's beautiful for cloud. And also, there's a huge robotics trend. People love. They love to geek out on space-related stuff. Yep. Awesome. Well, the cube will be there. Any numbers? Is it going to be the same location? Or is it going to be the same location at the convention center, June 20th and 21st? We're going to have boot camps and certification labs and all that kind of stuff. I expect we'll grow again. So definitely more than 7,000 people. How big was the first one? Oh, my gosh. The first one was in a little hotel conference room. I think there were 150 people there. Sounds like re-invent having all over again. We've seen this movie before. Yeah. Trisha, thanks so much for coming on the cube here. Thank you. In the headquarters of Amazon Web Services Public Sector in Washington, DC, we're in Arlington, Virginia, right next to the nation's capital. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.