 Hello, and welcome to theCUBE. We are here live on the ground in the expo floor of a live event, the AWS Public Sector Summit. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here for the next two days, wall-to-wall coverage. I'm here with Sandy Carter to kick off the event. Vice President and partners at AWS Public Sector. Great to see you, Sandy. So great to see you're John live and in person, right? I'm excited. I'm jumping out of my chair because I did a Twitter periscope yesterday and said a live event and all the comments are, oh my God, an expo floor. A real event. So congratulations. That's right, it's very true. Yeah, we're so excited. Yesterday we had our partner day and we sold out the event. It was rock'em and pack'em and we had to turn people away. So what a great experience, right? Well, I'm excited. People are actually happy. We tried, we tried covered Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Still people were there. People felt good here. Same vibe. People are excited to be in person. You got all your partners here. You guys had an amazing year. Congratulations. We did a couple of awards show with you guys. But I think the big story is the Amazon services for the partners, public sector, has been a real game changer. I mean, we talked about it before, but again, it continues to happen. What's the update? Yeah, well we had, so there's lots of announcements. So let me start out with some really cool growth things because I know you're a big growth guy. So we announced here at the conference yesterday that our government competency program for partners is now the number one industry in AWS for our, the competency. That's a huge deal. Government is growing so fast. We saw that during the pandemic, everybody was moving to the cloud. And it's just affirmation with the government competency now taking that number one position across AWS. So not across public sector, across AWS. And then one of our fastest growing areas as well as healthcare. So we now have an ATO, authority to operate for HIPAA and high trust. And that's now our fastest growing area with 85% growth. So I love that new news about the growth that we're seeing in public sector and all the energy that's going into the cloud and beyond. You know, one of the things, and again, we talked about it before in another CUBE interview, but I want to get your reaction now, current and state of the art now in a moment. The pandemic has highlighted the antiquated outdated systems and highlighted how inadequate they are. Cloud, you guys have done an amazing job to stand up value quickly. Now we're in a hybrid world. So you got hybrid, automation, AI, driving complete change. And it's happening pretty quick. What's the new things that you guys are seeing that's emerging? Obviously, if you have steady state of more growth, but like what's the big success programs that you're seeing right now? Well, there's a few new programs that we're seeing that have really taken off. So one is called ProServe Ready. We announced yesterday that it's now GA in the US and Amia. And why that's so important is that our ProServe team, a lot of times when they're doing contracts, they run out of resources. And so they need to tap on the shoulder some partners to come and help them. And the customer has told us that they wanted them to be ProServe Ready. So to have that badge of honor, if you would, that they're using the same templates, the same best practices that we use as well. And so we're seeing that as a big value creator for our partners, but also for our customers. Because now those partners are being trained by AWS and really helping to be mentored like on the job training as they go. It's a very powerful program. Well, one of the things I'm really impressed by, and I talked to some of your MSP partners on the floor here as they walk by, they see the cube, they're all doing well. They're all happy. They got to spring in their step. And the thing is that this public-private partnerships is a real trend. We've been talking about it for a while. More people in the public sector are saying, hey, I need a commercial relationship, not the old school, we're public, we have all these rules, there's more collaboration. Can you share your thoughts on how you see that evolving? Because now the partners in the public sector are partnering closer than ever before. Yeah, it's really, I think it's really fascinating because a lot of our new partners are actually commercial partners that are now choosing to add a public sector practice with them. And I think a lot of that is because of these public and private partnerships. So let me give you an example, space. So we were at the Space Symposium. Our first time ever for AWS at the Space Symposium. And what we found was there were partners there like Orbital Insight, who's bringing data from satellites. They're a public sector partner. But that data is being used for insurance companies, being used for agriculture, being used to impact environment. So I think a lot of those public-private partnerships are strengthening as we go through COVID or hopefully getting out of COVID. And we do see a lot of push in that area. Talk about healthcare, because healthcare is, again, changing radically. We talk to customers all the time, and they're like, they have a lot of legacy systems, but they can't just throw them away. So Cloud Native aligns well with healthcare. It does, and in fact, if you think about healthcare, most healthcare, they don't build solutions themselves. They depend on partners to build them. So they do, the customer does a buy and the partner does the build. So it's a great and exciting area for our partners. We just launched a new program called the Mission Accelerator Program. It's in beta. And that program is really fascinating because our healthcare partners, our government partners, and more now can use these accelerators that maybe isolate a common area like digital analytics for healthcare. And they can reuse those. So it's pretty, I think it's really exciting today as we think about the potential healthcare and beyond. You know, one of the challenges that I always thought you had that you guys do a good job on, I'd love to get your reaction to now is, there's more and more people who want to partner with you than ever before. And sometimes it hasn't always been easy in the old days, like to get FedRAMP certified or even deal with public sector if you were a commercial vendor. You guys have done a lot with accelerating certifications. Where are you on that spectrum now? What's the next wave of partner onboarding or what's the partner trends around the opportunities in public sector? Well, one of the new things that we announced, we had tested it out in the US. You know, that's the Amazon way, right? Andy's way. You test it, you experiment it. If it works, you roll it out. We have a concierge program now to help a lot of those new partners get inundated into public sector. And so it's basically, I'm going to hold your hand. Just like at a hotel, I would go up and say, hey, can you direct me to the right restaurant or to the right museum? We do the same thing. We hand hold people through that process. If you don't want to do that, we also have a new program called Navigate, which is built for brand new partners. And what that enables our partners to do is to kind of be guided through that process. So you are right. We have so many partners now who want to come and grow with us that it's really essential that we provide them a great partner experience to have on board. Yeah, and the APN was the Amazon Partner Network. Also has a lot of crossover. You see a lot of that going on because the cloud, it's, you can do both. Absolutely. And I think it's really, we leverage all of the APN programs that exist today. So for example, there was just a new program that was put out for a growth rebate and that was driven by the APN and we're leveraging and using that in public sector too. So there's a lot of cross use going on to make it easier for our partners to do business with us. So I have to ask you on a personal note, I know we've talked about before, you're very comfortable with the virtual now hybrid space. How's your team doing? How's the structure look like? What are your goals? What are you excited about? Well, I think I have the greatest team ever. So of course I'm excited about our team and we are working in this new hybrid world. So it is a change for everybody. The other day we had some people in the office and some people calling in virtually. So how to manage that was really quite interesting. Our goals that we align our whole team around and we talked a little bit about this yesterday are around mission, which are these solution areas, migration, so getting everything to the cloud and then in the cloud we talk about modernization. Are you going to use AIML or IoT? And we actually just announced a new program around that too to help out IoT partners to really build and understand that data that's coming in from IoT. IDC says that that IoT data has increased by four times during the COVID period. So there's so many more partners who need help there. There's a huge shift going on. We always try to explain it on theCUBE and Dave and I talk about it a lot and it's you replatform with the cloud, which is not just lift and shift, you kind of move and then replatform, then refactoring your business. And there's a nuance there between replatforming, which is great, take advantage of cloud scale, but the refactoring allows for this unique advantage of these high level services. That's right. And this is where people are winning. What's your reaction to that? Oh, I completely agree. I think this whole area of modernizing your application, like we have a lot of folks who are doing mainframe migrations. And to your point, if they just lift what they had in Kobo and they move it to AWS, there's really not a lot of value there, but when they rewrite the code, when they refactor the code, that's where we're seeing tremendous breakthrough momentum with our partner community. Deloitte is one of our top partners with our mainframe migration. They have both our technology and our consulting mainframe migration competency there, too. One of the other things I think you would be interested in is in our session yesterday, we just completed some research with our CTOs and we talked about the next meta trends that are coming around Web 3.0. And I'm sure you've been hearing a lot about Web 3.0, right? Yeah, 3.0, 4.0, it's all moving to, I mean fast. I mean, it's moving fast. And so some of the things we talked to our partners about yesterday are like the metaverse that's coming. So you talked about healthcare. Yesterday, electronic caregiver announced an entire application for virtual caregivers in the metaverse. We talked about blockchain and the rise of blockchain. Yesterday we had a whole set of meetings. Everybody was talking about blockchain because now you've got El Salvador, Panama, Ukraine, who have all adopted Bitcoin, which is built on the blockchain. So there are some really exciting things going on in technology and public sector. It's a societal shift and I think the confluence of tech, user experience, data, new decentralized ways is changing society, you're the middle of it. We are and our partners are in the middle of it and data, data, data, data, that's what I would say. Everybody's using data. You and I even talked about how you guys are using data. Data is really a hot topic and we're really trying to help our partners figure out not just how to migrate the data to the cloud, but also to use that analytics and machine learning on it too. Well thanks for sharing the data here on our opening segment, the insights we will be getting out of them, it'll be great. Sandy, great to see you. We've got a couple more interviews with you. So thanks for coming on. Appreciate you and thanks for all your support. You guys are doing great. Your partners are happy. You're on a great wave. Congratulations. Thank you, John. Appreciate it. Okay, more coverage from theCUBE here. Data is public sector summit. We'll be right back.