 Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Summit here, Public Sector Summit, here in Washington DC. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're live at a physical event. People face to face. We're here with theCUBE on the ground back in business. Of course, we've got the VirtualCube. We've got theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston. We're going to bring you all the great coverage. And our next guest is Karola Kazaneva. Kazaneva, got it. Chief of Channels at PEGA Systems, also known as PEGA. Official titles head of global partner ecosystem, but you're known as the Chief of Channels. Absolutely. Thank you for coming on. Absolutely, nice to be here face to face in an event. So happy. It feels good. It feels great. People are happy. Still good attendance considering what it is, about five, six thousand people roughly. Give or take, maybe up to seven thousand. Who knows? But you guys have a really strong relationship with AWS. You're the Chief of the channel. You guys have a great enabling product that crashes itself, as you guys say. So let's get into it. But before, explain what PEGA does. Okay, so PEGA is a one billion dollar company. It's a software company. And we call it that software built itself. Because we are definitely here to crush customer complexity. So we do it by three, doing three things. One to one customer engagement, customer service, and also intelligent automation. So we are a platform, and we are helping any single client that has a complex solution to make it simple and to have a good customer experience. So I got it wrong. It doesn't crash itself. It crashes complexity. It builds itself. Okay, there it is. Exactly. All right, I got that out of the way. Software that crashes itself actually doesn't really kind of, doesn't sound like a compelling product, but it's not the case. So I got to ask you, so ecosystems are a big part of the cloud. Amazon has a great ecosystem, but the ecosystem has ecosystems starting to see an expansion of the cloud business with the software model, with cloud scale. What are you guys doing in the channel within the public sector? How do you guys work? How do people engage with you? Okay, so first of all, we were always a very friendly channel partner, but we were using our partners only for implementation. Because our product is so built for each of the clients, there's a lot of services opportunity, and we have very strong PEGA practices in the different partners. But last year when I came in, I came in almost 16 months ago, we decided that we wanted also to improve our sales with the partners. So we are engaging with partners end to end, from the beginning of a sales cycle and brainstorming on what the client needs in order to be more efficient, to reduce cost, to the moment of the implementation. So we have been working with several system integrators, some resellers, and with AWS as our cloud platform. So we have been moving everything we can to the PEGA cloud that is on AWS, and clients are really happy to be modernizing there because there you have the security, the scalability, the new versions of the product without having to be worrying about it because it's done by our support team. So it's software on Amazon, so customers can, they buy your software through the marketplace or whatever, through a partner or the marketplace, and then they can still use the higher level services at AWS, correct? They can use the high end services in AWS or with any other partner system integrator that also works with AWS. And we have many cases where we use the power of three, right, we work with AWS Accenture and for example, PEGA, or we can use Leidos or Buzalen or Peraton, any of the partners that are here in government too. So you know the channel equation, you're the chief of the channel. Channels love simplicity, simple products to buy. They love products that can throw off gross profit and you said services. How is that going? Are you guys seeing a good economic equation with your partners? Well, our partners do between five and 10x of the revenue that we do on software, on services. So that equation definitely works and they love it for that. At the same time, we have invested five x the quantity of people that we have supporting the channel, for example, here in government. We have invested also two or three times on the rest of the business but there has been definitely good investments for partners. The partners are happy with us because again, not only they can do a good business, one off, they can then radiate. One usually clients, once they buy PEGA for one of their use cases or case management as we call it, they usually want to replicate it in other cases and that is where the partners are doing enormous money because they are replicating the same use case in different departments. That's the way it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be. They're touching the customer, they're adding value on top of your product. So they get to have the best of both worlds, high margins on the profits and the services but yet work with the customer directly to engage and make sure they get the right solution from you and AWS together. Absolutely. Okay, what are the key challenges that you find that partners need to solve and overcome to keep this equation going? What do you guys focus on? You mentioned more people. What are some of the trends in the public cloud, I mean public sector area? What's the system of the dynamics? So in this moment, the whole world is with a huge need of digital transformation. Every single client, but especially in government, they had all digital transformation projects but they were going at slow motion. Because of the situation of the pandemic that I don't even want to name it again because everybody's talking about it but it's a reality, these projects have to accelerate 10 times. So whatever it was going to be done in five years is being done in one. So the biggest challenge that we are having is to ensure that we have that capacity to support all these projects that are being done very fast. And for that, that's why we also need our partners, right? Because they have big, big practices. They have been investing as well as we are to ensure that we cover all those needs. And for now, we are doing well. And so that's great. We are growing as a company and with the partners. Carol, great to have you on board with the company now, kicking some butt now in the channel, chief of channel, good margins, happy customers growth. What are some of the use case successes that you've had? Can you name a few customers and what they've done and what's their best practice? Well, we have, I will name some government because we are in a public sector event but we have, I will name North America although we also have in the rest of the world. So US Census, that is something that everybody has done, right? Even if you did it in your mobile, you did it on paper, you did it on the phone, all of that was managed by PEGA. And for the first time ever, there was zero downtime, not a single problem to access the web, for example. The US Census took us 50% less expense than the one that we did in 2010 just because we use this digital approach. And then we also were 50% more efficient because we didn't need to use all that paper storage that was used in the past. So we taxpayer have to be happy because they really spend less than what they should have spent on this topic. So definitely that was one of the biggest cases that we have in 2020. We have other, we do big, big projects like the US Census or we do smaller projects. And there's one that is not small but that is smaller. That is the New Jersey courts that caught my attention because I imagine myself in a situation like that that you are like by mistake taken to the court and you have to defend yourself, that was taking three hours. And it's stressful, right? And you don't have to be there if you don't need to. And this process got to 20 minutes. That is also reduction on expenses, even jail expenses sometimes. So that was one that we did as well. And that was just by making four legacy systems, getting to one and having a much faster experience on that. So a lot of migrations, a lot of cloud native refactoring going on in the application, sounds like? Yes, what we do is whatever legacy systems you have, we managed to ensure that we connect them all and to have a front line so that you can access the information real time and that you can, as a user, and that you can really have a better experience. Whatever you do today, whatever company, telco company you have, bank you use, I can guarantee you have used Pega. You just don't know about it. It's under the covers. I got to ask you my final question. I'll see you guys really doing some good business out here. What if people watching here are trying to understand the dynamics of public sector market? What's your take? What would you say to that person? What's the big story happening in public sector? Well, to begin with, I'm not a public sector expert, so I'm sure there's a lot of public sector experts out there that can tell me, oh no, you'll miss this point. But what I have seen in these days that I have been here with the team is that the government needs to act fast in order to digitalize all these projects. So one of our partners yesterday was telling me that there is a mandate in the army, for example, to move everything to cloud. How do you do it? They don't even know. They are people that they don't know how to do this. So our partners are building solutions to help them faster get into the cloud because they have to do it by the end of the year. And these are the key things that we are working on with partners to build solutions that can really, they can access fast. It's a robust ecosystem. And they can scale, yeah. It's a very robust ecosystem. Yes. Amazon is an ecosystem, you guys. And you have an ecosystem. It's an ecosystem of ecosystems. And that is what works, right? Because Amazon has very good sellers, for example, very good people that know the clients and they have a lot of experience, but they are not specialized in what Pega does. That's where the channel comes in. These other partners have a Pega practice. They are experts. And as I told you, this is about crashing complexity. So it's making, you need to understand the technology and the details behind it to make the best solution to the clients. Karola, great to have you on. Very dynamic, love chatting with you. Karola Casanave? Casanave, yes. Casanave, chief of channels at Pega Systems. Also knows Pega, great to have you on. Congratulations on your success. Ecosystems within an ecosystem, crushing complexity, Mr. Q, bringing you all the signal out there from the noise. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.