 All you and jobs is probably one of the most rewarding things I've ever been involved in. And I bring that energy to theCUBE because theCUBE is where all the ideas are and where the experts are, where the people are. And I think what's most exciting about theCUBE is that we get to talk to people who are making things happen. Entrepreneurs, CEO of companies, venture capitalists, people who are really on a day in and day out basis building great companies. And the technology business is just not a lot of real-time live TV coverage. And theCUBE is a non-linear TV operation. We do everything that the TV guys on cable don't do. We do longer interviews. We ask tougher questions. We ask sometimes some light questions. We talk about the person and what they feel about. It's not prompted and scripted. It's a conversation. It's authentic. And for shows that have theCUBE cover it, it makes the show buzz. It creates excitement. More importantly, it creates great content, great digital assets that can be shared instantaneously to the world. 31 million people have viewed theCUBE and that is the result of great content, great conversations. And I'm so proud to be part of theCUBE with great team. Hi, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching theCUBE. Okay, welcome back everyone. CUBE coverage of AWS, Amazon web services, public sector summit in person here in Washington DC. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with Sandy Carter and Lynn Martin, VMware vice president of government education and healthcare. Great to see you, both CUBE alumnus. Although she's been on since 2014. Your first time as well, I think 2018, maybe? 2018. 2018, great to see you. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having us. So VMware and AWS have a huge partnership. We've covered that announcement when Andy and Pat Gelsing was the CEO. Then lots happened. A lot of growth, a lot of success. Congratulations. Thank you. What's the big news with AWS this year at public sector? So we just received our authorization top rate for FedRAM high. And we actually have a lot of joint road map planning. We are kicking off our job today with the Department of Defense and IL-5 for the defense customers is also in process. So a lot of fruits of a long time of labor. So I'm very excited to be here. Awesome. So explain what is the FedRAM authority to operate mean? What is that all about? So I would say in a nutshell, it's really putting a commercial offering through the security protocols to support the federal government needs. And there's different layers of that depending on the end user customer. So FedRAM high crosses across all the civilian and non-classified workloads in the federal government. Probably applicability for state and local government as well with the new state ramp focus. FedRAM high will meet or exceed that. So it'll be applicable across the other parts of the government as well and all operated in a controlled environment jointly. So you get the VMware software stack on top of the platform from AWS and all the services at AWS. So more VMware faster deployed usage, faster acceleration? Yeah, so I would say today the government operates on VMware across all of the government state, local and federal. Some workloads are still on-prem, many. And this will really accelerate that transformation journey to the cloud and be able to move workloads quicker onto the VMC on AWS platform without re-architecting your applications. Without giving away any kind of VMworld secrets because that's next week. What is the value proposition of VMware cloud on AWS? What is the main value proposition you guys see in the public sector? So I see three and then Sandy chime in there too. I would say the cost in general to operate in the cloud versus on-prem are significant savings. We've seen savings over 300% on some customers. The speed on the application movement I think is a huge unique benefit on VMC on AWS. So traditionally to move to native clouds you have to really do a lot of application work to be able to move those workloads where on VMC on AWS you move them pretty fast. And it also leverages the investments that the government agencies have already made in their operational tools and things of that nature. So it's not like a full reinvestment for something new but really leveraging both the skill sets in the data center and the IT shops and the tools and investments you've bought over the past. And then the third area I would say is really getting the agility and flexibility and speed of a cloud experience. So what's your reaction to the partnership? You know, we were just talking in a survey to our customers and 67% of them said that the velocity of the migration really matters to them. And one of the things that we do really well together is migrate very quickly. So we have workloads that we've migrated that have taken weeks, months, as opposed to years as they go over, which is really powerful. And then also tomorrow, VMware is with us in a session on data-led migration. We were talking about data earlier. And a VMware cloud on AWS also helps to migrate over like SQL server database, Oracle databases so that we can also leverage that data now on the cloud to make better decisions and real-time decisions as well. It's been really interesting to watch the partnership and watching VMware transform as well. Not only the migrations are in play with the public sector, there's a lot of them, believe me, healthcare, you name every area. It's all those old systems are out there. You know what I'm talking about out there. But now with microservices and like, say containers, you got Tanzu and you got the whole cloud native VMware stack emerging. That's going to allow customers to refactor. This is a dynamic that is kind of under-reported. Migration's one thing, but refactoring- I think that the whole Tanzu portfolio is one of the most interesting things going on in VMware. And we also have some integration going on on VMC on AWS with Tanzu. We don't have that pedogram yet for the government market, but it's on the roadmap and plans. And we have other customers and I would say, some of my non-federal government customers were able to move workloads in hours, not even days are we literally back and forth and very impressive on the VMC on AWS platform. So as we expand things in with the Tanzu platform, Sandy talked about this yesterday in our partner summit. Everyone's talking about containers and things like that. VMware is doing a lot of investment around the Kubernetes plus the application migration work and things of that nature. I'd love to get you guys reaction to this comment because I've seen a lot of change. Obviously we're all seeing it, but I've actually interviewed a bunch of AWS and VMware customers. And I would call some of the categories skeptics, the old school cloud holding the line. And then when the pandemic hit, those skeptics flip over. Because they see the value. In fact, I actually interviewed a skeptic who became an award winner who went on the record and said, I love AWS, I love the cloud. I was a skeptic because he saw the value, the time to value. This is really a key dynamic. I know it's kind of thrown out a lot in digital transformation or IT modernization, but the agility and that kind of speed it becomes the number one thing. What's your reaction to the skeptics converting and then what happens next? So I think there's still a lot of folks in IT that are tree huggers or I call them servo huggers, right? Data center huggers, pick your term. And I think that there is some concern about what their role will be. So I think one of the differences delivering cloud services to your internal constituents is really understanding the business value of the applications and what that delivers from a mission perspective back to your clients. And that's a shift for data center owners to really start thinking more from the customer mission perspective than, oh, are my servers running? Do I have enough storage capacity, blah, blah, blah. So I think that creates that skepticism and part of that's around what's my role going to be. So in the cloud transformation of a customer, there's all this old people part that becomes really the catalyst. And I think the customers that have embraced that and really leveraged that and then retooled the business value back to the end users around the mission had done the best job. Yeah, I mean, Cindy, we talk about this all the time. It's really hard to get the best to breed partners together and then make it all work. But with cloud, it becomes easier than doing it very bespoke or waterfall way. Yeah, I have to say with the announcement yesterday, we're going to have a lot more partnering with partners. So you and I have talked about this a few times where we bring partners together to work with each other. In fact, Lynn is going to go meet with one of those partners right after this interview that want to really focus in on a couple of particular areas to really drive this. And I think, you know, part of the, you know, as you're refactoring or migrating VMware over, the other big benefit is skills. You know, people have really strong vSphere skills, vSAN skills, operation tools, yeah. And so they want to preserve those. I think that's part of the beauty of doing VMware Cloud on AWS is you get to take those skills with you into the new world as well. You know, I was going to just ask that next question. AI ops or day two operations is a big buzzword. Yeah. And that is essentially operation mindset. Yeah, that's what I was- DevOps, DevOps 2.0 is coming. Emily Freeman gave a keynote at what our last event we had with Amazon public showcase. Revolution and DevOps. DevOps 2.0 is coming, which is now faster. Security's built in the front end. So all these things are happening. So now it's coming into the public sector with the GovCloud. So I have to ask you, Lynn, what are some of the big successes you've had with on the GovCloud, AWS GovCloud? So I would say we've had a lot of customers across the state and local side, especially, that weren't waiting for FedRAMP. And those customers were able to move. Like I mentioned this earlier and you guys just touched on it. So I think the benefit, key benefit, one of our best customers is MIT, right? Absolutely. MIT, God bless them. They've been on every cloud journey with VMware since 2014. And we're moving, I think it's three years now. That's right. And talk about a skeptic. So although Mark is very revolutionary and tries new things, he was like, oh, who knows? And literally when we moved those workloads, it was minutes. And the IT shop day one, there was no transformation work for them. It was literally using all the tools and things in that environment. So the progress of that and the growth of the applications that have been able to move there, things that took two to three years before were all done within six months and really being able to expand those business values back out for the services that he delivers to the customers. So I think you'll see quite a bit across state, local, federal government, we have U.S. Marshals, I think that's right. Thank them very much. They were our sponsor that we've been working with the last few years. We have a defense customer that's been working with us around IL-5, you know. And if we could also thank Coldfire, because Coldfire is one of our joint partners, talking about partner and partners, and they played a critical role in helping VMware Cloud on AWS and get the Fed Ramp High certification too. They were our three P.O. We hired them for their expertise with AWS as well as helping the VMware team. Well, the AWS partnership with VMware has been a really big success. And I remember the naysayers when that was announced, it really has worked out well for you guys. I do want to ask you one more thing and we don't mind. One of the biggest challenges that you see the blockers are challenges from agencies moving to the cloud, the government cloud, because people are always trying to get those blockers out of the way. Whether it's an organizational, it's a culture, it's a process, technology, what's your take on that, Lynn? I think a lot does have to do with the people and the organizational history. I think somewhere you need a leader and a champion that really wants to change for good. Pat used to call it tech for good. I love that, right? To really get things moving for the customers. I mean, one of the things I'm most proud about supporting the government business in general though is really the focus on the mission is unparalleled. In the sectors we support. If you say education or government or healthcare, all three of those sectors, there's never any doubt on what that focus is. So I think the positives of it are like how do you get into that change around that? And that could be systems. There's less with VMC on AWS as we mentioned because the tools are already in the environment so they don't have to use it. But I do think there's a transformation on the data center teams and really becoming moving from technology to the business aspects a little bit more around the missions and things of that. What's interesting is that I mean, I actually love this environment even though it's kind of hard on everyone. Education and healthcare have been disrupted in unprecedented ways and it's never going to change back. Remember healthcare, HIPAA, data, silos, silos, education, don't spend on IT. Now- I thought education was the most remarkable part. Unbelievable. I started working in February before schools started with one of the large cities. Everyone could guess. And just the way they were able to pivot so fast was amazing. And I don't think anybody, I think we did like five years of transformation in six months and it's never going to go back. I completely agree, yeah. I mean, education, we just did a piece of work with CTOs around the world and education is one of the most disrupted, have you said, healthcare. And then the third one is government and all three of those are public sectors. So the three most disruptive sectors or mission areas are in public sector, which has created a lot of opportunity for us and our partnership to add value. I mean, that's what we're all about, right? Customer obsession, working back with some of the customer and making sure that our partnership continues to add value to those customers. While we love the tech action on theCUBE, obviously we'd like to document and pontificate and talk about it. Digital revolution, every application now is in play globally, not just for IT, but for society. I mean, public sector more than ever is the hottest area on the planet. Absolutely. And I would say that now our customers are looking at ESG environmental. They want to know what you're doing on sustainability. They want to know what you're doing for society. We just had a bid that came in and they wanted to understand our diversity plan and then open governance. So they're looking for that openness. They're not just artificial intelligence, but looking at explainable AI as well. So I think that we have a chance to impact environment, societies, and governance. And you mentioned space earlier, and I talked to Clint Grozier, I mean, I'm going to interview him today too. But what's happening with space and what you can monitor, disasters, understand how to deploy resources to areas that might have challenges, earthquakes or fires or other things. All new things are happening. Absolutely. And all that data, you know, people like to say, why are you spending money on space? There's so many problems here, but that data that comes from space is going to impact us here on earth. And so all the things that we're doing, all that data could be used with VMware Cloud on AWS as well. Well, you watch closely. We got some space coverage coming. I got a big scoop. I'm going to release soon about something behind the dark side of the moon in terms of space sovereignty coming. A lot of action, cybersecurity in space. That's cool. Really heavy right now. Yeah. But aren't you glad that VMC Cloud on AWS isn't hidden on the dark side of the moon? Yeah. Any customer can access it today. Congratulations on, Lynn, thanks for coming on. You guys are doing great. Thanks for sharing. Thank you so much. Congratulations. Okay. Cube Coverage here continues. AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, DC, live for two days of coverage. Be right back. Thank you.