 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit Online virtual. Obviously we are here in the Palo Alto Studios, I'm your host John Furrier with theCUBE, with the quarantine crew. We've got a great guest, Cube alumni Shannon Kellogg, Vice President of Amazon Web Services, AWS Public Policy, Shannon, great to see you. Hey John, it's great to be back. I do feel like I'm a bonafide alumnus of theCUBE, so thanks for having me. It's always great to have you on. We've had many conversations about policy and modernization of government. That's been the big trend wave in your world. Now with COVID-19, you cannot ignore this. This was no longer an adjunct to physical spaces or physical realities. This reality is about virtualization of data, workloads, work, work forces, work places, work loads, work flows. You name it, it's impacted. And certainly this is a tough time for everyone to do work. And more importantly, it shows all the problems with modernization, people who aren't modern are really suffering. So I want to get your thoughts about as we go through this pandemic and look at stabilizing and then coming out of it, there's a lot of reinvention and a lot of growth strategies that are changing in real time. So I want to get your thoughts on that real quick. Yeah, well, John, we've seen more innovation and migration to the cloud in the last few months than we have over the last few years. And, you know, things have been steady the last few years. You know, you've seen organizations continually migrate to cloud and AWS, but organizations now are accelerating. We're seeing it at every level of government. We're seeing it in the education sector. We're seeing it, of course, in healthcare. And so organizations are trying to transform fast. One of the first problem sets that we were tackling in the early days of the COVID-19 response was to work with states here in the U.S. as they were trying to set up their unemployment response efforts and their unemployment insurance portals in places where citizens could go in and apply for those benefits. And you had a lot of states that were dealing with some very old legacy systems that had to move quickly. And we, you know, partnered with many of them and several of our providers, service providers to get them set up fast. And so that was one of the first things that we saw during the early stages of COVID-19. One of the big memes going around the internet obviously past couple of months is, you know, the cliche of digital transformation or directional mission. And then just being celebrated by COVID, kind of like a wrecking ball, kind of hitting that digital transformation theme, really kind of exposing people to the reality that has to happen faster. I want to get your thoughts on this because you published an op-ed piece today around the COVID-19 response on how the federal government should respond to this. And it's titled Rethinking Government Services in the Wake of COVID-19. You really make some strong points there. And I want to get your thoughts on that. Can you just give a quick highlights of the key thoughts on that op-ed? What are you trying to say there? What's the positioning? What's the message? Yeah, well, as I mentioned, governments at every level have already started to accelerate their digital transformation efforts. And one of the things that I was trying to really emphasize in the op-ed today was that there is an opportunity to continue to do that, certainly in the federal government, but also at state and local levels. And, you know, there have to be some investment in order to continue to enable that transformation. And there has to be continued leadership and focus on it. And of course it doesn't end just with government digital transformation. We're seeing it in the education sector. We're seeing it in the healthcare sector. And so what I am trying to emphasize now is that we've come a long way, even in a few months, in helping organizations through this transformation provide better citizen services, provide emergency response efforts, including, you know, as I mentioned at the state level, getting these unemployment insurance portals set up fast in the virtual call centers organized around those. And certainly at the federal government, we've seen some large scale programs rolled out without cloud computing that would not have been successful in several cases. When you think about the billions of dollars and really trillions of dollars that's rolled out through these federal government relief efforts, IT has been a very important part of that. And so now we need to continue to move forward and accelerate this digital transformation across the board. We owe it, quite frankly, to citizens. And, you know, I think that there are a lot of lessons learned that we can draw from COVID-19 responses. So are you making a case for Congress to allocate money for modernization of these IT services? Yeah, the good news is, John, is that Congress for years in a bipartisan way has been supporting federal IT modernization. And now they have an opportunity, especially as you look at what's happening out at the states. And again, thinking about how some of these old legacy systems really delayed or hurt some of the COVID-19 response efforts, the states need funding in order to modernize some of these systems. And of course, not every federal agency has the funding that they need either. And there's an opportunity for Congress also to provide some of that funding. I saw that you spoke with my colleague, Matt Cornelius, over at the Alliance for Digital Innovation and talked a lot about the modernizing technology fund and some of those efforts and how important it is for Congress in a bipartisan way to make sure that the IT modernization in federal agencies fully funded. And I support that, and I know that many other, not only companies, but trade associations like the Alliance for Digital Innovation do as well. And then I'm going to talk about upscaling, of course, which is an important part of digital transformation. Well, I mean, look at the inadequacy of the systems. They're antiquated, they're old. You got unemployment. That's just new jobs that need to be filled. Reskilling of existing jobs because the cloud is part of it. And then just the local economy is going to be impacted, just online education, new roles and new responsibilities. So I got to ask you with what you're seeing, what other lessons have you learned that can keep up the momentum in the government? Because obviously this is an accelerant, this pandemic. What lessons are there? In addition to what I was saying earlier on the funding side, having a focus on training and upscaling and reskilling is really critical. We have a lot of workforce development programs here at Amazon and AWS that we're rolling out and providing support for our public sector customers and colleagues. We're also doing a lot in terms of helping various parts of the population retrain and get involved in the digital economy. One of the, I think really great examples of how we've been doing that for several years are the military assistance programs that we have been involved in. We're working with partners, community college level, four year education institutions to provide training and certification for workers that are coming out of the military and or their spouses. That's something that we've worked both again at the community college level, but even have partnered with the federal government and the Department of Labor in some of those programs. And we have to continue to do that. We and others to accelerate what we're doing in terms of the workforce development effort across every level of government, quite frankly. You know, I've been doing a lot of virtual cube virtual events, covering them, building software for them. And then there's this big focus on the remote workers work from home. I get that that's an IT kind of paradigm. Companies have a focus of their workers, but also there's a remote customer or remote prospect or remote user. So the stakeholders of all these systems now are exposed and it's pretty obvious who's winning and who's got a good solution. So I got to ask you, what's the learnings of you are you're seeing over the past few months around this remote worker or remote consumer because people have to do their jobs, but they also have suppliers. And again, this is back to the how the internet has evolved the ecosystem of partners and companies and stakeholders. There's a lot of learnings here. What would you share in the past couple of months? Well, John, it's probably obvious to you that COVID-19 has transformed how people are working, obviously. And that's no different here at Amazon. Many of us are working remotely and have been for several months. Certainly we're seeing a huge transformation in the public sector around remote work. The federal government, as you know, for years has had initiatives around telework. Champions like Jerry Connelly, a US representative from Virginia, have been very focused on trying to move the federal government in that direction. And thank goodness, because I think if those efforts weren't already in place, you would not have seen as many people be able to work from home as fast as they did during COVID-19. But still there's a lot more work to do in our federal agencies to adopt telework and remote working. We're seeing that at the state level. We're seeing that in educational institutions. There's a ton more work there to do. And I think there's an opportunity to continue through these digital transformation efforts enabling remote work and telework. But we also have to have bipartisan collaboration to continue to push forward those efforts at the federal level. You know, it's interesting, and I want to get your reaction because you're a veteran not only of the technology but also policy. And as I was saying earlier in an interview I was doing this morning around your event is that on the commercial side, we saw Amazon, I mean obviously a history of Amazon developers, IT, enterprise, commercial, and now public sector, it's the same movie. Inadequate old systems need to be modernized clouds certainly helping there. But if you look at the flywheel of Amazon, you got infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and SaaS. A lot of people in the public sector are laying down the foundational things around infrastructure, getting an auditing compliance system that's agile and then building a platform on top for a new workload. So I got to get your reaction to the three things that we're seeing, changing technology, changing economics and changing expectations and experiences that are happening right now at an accelerated level. All three of those theaters are exploding and change with your thoughts and reaction. Well, one of the things that I've seen over the years as you saw first movers in the cloud and you saw organizations adopt these technologies is that sometimes when you look at federal workers, for example, or you even look across the public sector, people were a little apprehensive sometimes in adopting these new technologies and practices because they were adverse to risk or felt that if they did serve as a first mover, do something bold that it might come back to potentially hurt them in some way in terms of the risk that they took if something went wrong. And so now over the last several months, I've seen that apprehension in every organization that we're working with basically not be there because people recognize that they have to move now, move quickly and adopt these new technologies, adopt these new practices in order to do their jobs to provide if you're in government, the right services to your citizens and to the people who need those services. If you're in the private sector to move faster to be able to provide more services more quickly to your customers. I mean, think about a company like ours where we had to scale up very, very fast. We were already scaling rapidly but we had to scale even more rapidly. And so it's really, really important, I think that we draw on these lessons over the last few months, especially in relation to the public sector where it's okay to take a risk, it's okay to adopt new technologies and practices and it's okay to move fast because you know what? In a situation like COVID-19, sometimes you're going to have to move very, very quickly to that remote working environment or you're going to have to move very quickly to set up a digital or virtual call center in order to provide basic services that people need to survive. And so it's just a really interesting transformation that I'm seeing out there. Yeah, and what's interesting, I'll just share some commentary from myself and I want to get your reaction to that is that in the hundreds of people that I've talked to in the DC area covering public sector of the past many years is has been this younger audience and this younger workforce. And then now look at the pandemic and you look at the impact on education, unemployment in the citizenship in the communities, not just state but local, you're seeing an uprising, you're seeing a silent revolution from the younger constituents who were saying, you know, hey, I don't care what it takes, just go faster, support me, deliver the kind of serve, be agile. I mean, they're kind of speaking DevOps in their own way. So a silent revolution is happening and I want to get your thoughts because I know you and I have talked about this briefly and I use the word silent revolution but people of a younger generation are like, what are you talking about manuals like shipping old procurement methods? What's the problem? What's the blocker? Why is that there? There's really no answer to that. So I want to get your thoughts to that because this is something that we're seeing again this silent revolution is emerging in this IT modernization in the government because people will expect faster services. They're unemployed. They want education. I would almost call it more of a startup mentality and you know, I don't think it's even age restrictive. You know, every organization that we're working with, we have workers in every age group and you know, we're seeing people just shift to this mentality of, okay, I need this service now, I need to move faster and you know, we have to get access to this remotely in order to do this or to do that. And so to me, it's not necessarily just in a certain part of our population and it's everybody is starting to think that way in every organization that we're working with and they're throwing out some of the, you know just some of the old practices or old way of thinking. I mean, I can't tell you how many state officials I've had call me during this COVID-19 response who were asking for help. Like we've got to do this now. How can we get your help to do this now? And to me, that's just, you know that startup mentality, like we've got to figure this out no matter if our procurement practices aren't where they should be or our systems aren't where they should be we have to figure this out. And to me, that's sort of a startup mentality, a, you know, transformational approach that we're seeing across the board. I would agree with also add that a lot of people want to have a mission and they want to get involved in public service and see a way to contribute. So I see an inbound migration for people getting involved to solve some of these public sector problems because it's a societal impact. And I think you're going to start to see people realizing that they can just, they can protest that they can vote, but they also get involved. And I think you're going to see developers I think it's going to be a tsunami of new creative workloads or applications coming quickly. I think that's going to be very interesting. Yeah, John, I couldn't agree more. I think we're seeing transformation not just in the public sector and how services are providing are provided but also in our economy and how we interact with people and how we socialize. It's just a complete transformation in different way of thinking and organizations and individuals are out there creating right now, much of it in the cloud, trying to figure out how to innovate, trying to figure out how to come up with new business models and approaches. And so it's very exciting to see some of that pulse that's out there and to talk to people sort of thinking about new ways to do things. You know, it's unfortunately very tragic given the circumstances around COVID-19, but when things get difficult like this and people face challenges like this, they tend to, and we all tend to figure out how we can help, how we can maybe think differently, how we can help with transformation. And we're certainly seeing that in the public sector and through some of these digital transformation efforts, but to your point, we're also seeing it in the private sector. What's great about a free economy is people can solve problems together and that's one of the best things about America and the free states, nations out there. So I want to shift a little bit because I know this is something that's close to your heart as well as mine. You wrote a blog post this past year, earlier in the year we're supporting veterans to get into STEM programs. How are you thinking about that and getting them back into the workforce? Certainly for and after the pandemic. Yeah, we're really passionate about this area, John. I'm glad you asked. I mentioned a little bit before some of the training that we're doing with colleges and universities and even directly with the government for military members that are transferring out or folks that are already veterans and or their spouses. It's also important to remember the families who have been there right at the side of our veterans and those that are providing service in the military for the country. And so we're super passionate about that at every level of Amazon and every level certainly of AWS. We have a lot of programs across Amazon to hire veterans, to train veterans, including in both basic skills as well as advanced cloud skills. And we're super excited about all of those programs. I mentioned many of those in the blog post that you're referring to and I would encourage folks to look on our AWS public sector blog for more information on those efforts. We're constantly updating and providing more insight in how those programs are being conducted. Well, Shannon, one of the things that's interesting and just to kind of close out our chat here is sustainability because you look at the carbon footprint and a lot of cars on the road and you see in people being happy about that. But this points to what technology can do to help sustainability. You guys had some announcements here at the summit. Can you share highlights on that? Yeah, so we have lots going on in sustainability across Amazon. Amazon web services or AWS has been a big part of that. We have a long-term goal of being 100% renewable and eventually carbon neutral. Our initial renewable energy goal is in 2025. So we've been enabling the availability of a lot more utility scale renewable energy as part of that effort just across the river in Virginia. We have multiple solar projects that we've been putting in place and backing financially now for several years as part of that effort. And we're doing that across the country as well as across the world. And that's something that we believe very strongly in. And the company Amazon just announced a $2 billion climate fund last week that focuses on startups and new technologies and new companies in this space. And that is also something that we're very proud of. So we believe very strongly about this area. I've been involved for a number of years in sustainability efforts in the company and in particular in AWS. And I have the pleasure of also serving on the American Council for Renewable Energy, which is one of the leading nonprofits and organizations in this space. And there's a lot of momentum for renewable energy and even with some of the challenges around COVID-19 and the economic challenges that industry is moving forward. And we as a company are very, very committed to enabling more renewable energy to be available, including right across the river of Virginia. Well, Shannon, you've got your hands full as the Vice President of AWS Public Policy in DC. Not only do we have the pandemic, we just got them see change of massive innovation coming with digital. I know you got the world down there evolving very quickly. Congratulations and stay with it and keep plugging away for that innovation strategy. Appreciate it. John, we appreciate it. Thanks so much for including me and AWS on theCUBE again during the public sector summit. Always good to see you. My pleasure. Always great. Societal change is coming, real impact. This is with focus. Digital technology is going to make a difference, change the economics, change the experiences and outcomes for public services, public and societal change. Shannon Kellogg, Vice President of AWS Public Policy here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.