 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re-invent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin, this is day four for theCUBE. We have two live sets, I'm here with Dave Nicholson. Dave, two live sets, 100 guests on theCUBE for AWS re-invent 2021. Not all at the same time. Not all, that's a good, that's a good, he brings up a good point, not all at the same time. We are pleased to welcome Gretchen Perry, who's going to be sitting down and chatting with Dave and me next. She is from Salem at the U.S. state, local and education sled leader. We're going to be talking about Slalom and AWS digital innovation in the public sector. Gretchen, it's a pleasure to have you on the program. Thank you for having me. For the audience that might not be familiar with Slalom before we dig into AWS and sled in particular, talk to us about Slalom and what it is that you guys do. I'd love to. So Slalom's a modern business and technology consulting firm. We're headquartered in Seattle, Washington. We have about 11,000 employees across 40 markets globally. And what's different about Slalom is we're a local model firm. So our consultants live and work in the same locale, which means we're personally invested in our clients' outcomes because they impact us directly in the communities in which we live. And you've been a leader in sled for a long time. Talk to us about what's going on in sled these days. Obviously the last 18, 20, 22 months have been quite dynamic, but what's going on in the market? Absolutely. What we're seeing is an extra emphasis on data, data, data, obviously. Data is king and data is queen right now, right? So when the pandemic hit, we saw a ton of digital innovation as our sled clients needed to get their services online. That had been going on for a long time, but it absolutely accelerated when the pandemic hit. And then it was a public health hazard to ask people to come into the location. So what we saw was for constituents, we saw just absolute blast of omnichannel service delivery. So we saw the advent of SMS and chat bots and more tech services, right? Leveraging AWS Lex and Transcribe and other services of AWS really helped our sled clients react to the pandemic and respond to make sure that their constituents were receiving the digital services they needed and their employees were able to be productive at home. Well, that was one of the keys that the employee productivity, the student productivity, when everything went remote overnight, one of the most challenging things was we need the demand for collaboration tools. Then of course there's security challenges, there's concerns there, but talk to us about it and we've seen so much innovation out of AWS in the last, I mean always, but even what they announced the last couple of days, the innovation flywheel of AWS is probably stronger than ever, enabling organizations like Sled, Fed, private sector, public sector to be data driven. Absolutely. One thing that's really exciting right now is to see the evolution of how our sled customers are thinking about data. So when we've been working on like integrated visions in Sled for a long time, integrated justice, integrated healthcare, integrated eligibility, how do we bring all this information together so that we can supply the right information to the right people at the right time to deliver the right outcomes? And AWS has been a huge part of that. It's not the journey to get to the cloud, it's the destination once you get there, right? Because then you can leverage all their AI, ML tools, IoT, Edge, Container, Blockchain. And so our customers who have already made that switch to AWS, they're able to take advantage of that. It's not what you can do in the cloud anymore, it's what you can't do without it really, right? So we're seeing tons of advances. Intelligent document processing is one area I'm really excited about for our Sled clients and working very closely with AWS to make sure that we see our clients adopt that and achieve the value out of it. AWS is dominating the IT space, although what five to 15% of IT is in the cloud which means the vast majority is still on premises. So there's a huge potential for growth. In this sort of wild, wild West that we're in, there are all sorts of different kinds of services and consultancy partners that are seeking to bridge the gap between the technology that AWS delivers and the outcomes that customers desire. Now I've had a couple of experiences actually with Slalom folks that were very, very positive. And what I saw was that the Slalom people were embedded in a way that you don't see some other consultancies embedded. You mentioned that, it's something that piqued my interest. You talked about the local nature. Is that your superpower? Because it sure seemed to be powerful to see this person where some of these very, very large global companies had no idea who Slalom was until they realized that Sally was the one who had the best relationship with the customer. So Sally's a fictitious name that I just came up with. But I want to hear a little more about Slalom and your superpower and your differentiation because it's a crowded space. You've got global systems integrators. You've got all kinds of people. What makes you special? It's really the breadth of professional services that we provide combined with AWS's cloud technologies and services. What we do, I think a little bit differently is whereas AWS works back from the customer, we work back from our customer's vision. And so what we do, especially with our side clients, but with all of our commercial clients, is we say, what is your business strategy and your business vision? And how do we design the technology solutions working back from that? So you're able to answer the business questions through data-driven technology that's really important to you. And when we look at that, it's not just generating data to create information should then garner insights, but let's go one step further. And how do we create knowledge and how do we create wisdom in this space, right? Where we understand situational awareness, common operating pictures, that's really what we want to do. When we talk about criminal justice and public safety, I love how we're thinking about joining data in new and different ways. It's not necessarily applications anymore, right? How do we create data as a service? How do we create documents as a service where we're pulling out the exact information that we need from semi-structured, structured, and unstructured data and providing it to the right people to make the right decisions? Talk to us about intelligent document processing. A lot of buzz going on with that. What is it, where are public sector agencies in terms of embracing it, adopting it and having it be part of that vision? Yes, the promise is huge for IDP. What IDP is basically is leveraging AWS AI services to create intelligent automation solutions that help extract information from printed documents, digital documents, paper documents, right? So leveraging AWS services like Amazon Textract, Comprehend, Augmented AI, things like Enkendra. What that does in combination is it helps our clients unlock the data from, you can imagine government, it's heavy, heavy documents and in criminal justice and public safety in particular, these documents represent key milestones in processes, right? So we're never going to get rid of documents in Sled. They're going to be used in perpetuity. It's important for accessibility and practicality and everything else. But what this does is it lets us unlock the data from those kind of stale documents and create it into usable formats for so that people can make decisions. That's critical because there's, I mean, we talk about in Amazon, AWS, been this week been talking about it and Dave, we have too, every company, public sector, private sector needs to be a data-driven company but they need to be able to extract the value from the data and the data isn't just digital and that's something that, to your point, you know, that's going to be purchased within Sled. They have to be able to extract the value from it quickly. Yes. To be able to see what new products and services can we deliver, what directions should we be going and what outcomes should we be driving based on that visibility and that visibility is critical. Exactly. And right now we absolutely have to support our communities and we have a lot of our slide clients who are talking about this is a time where we don't just respond in a way that helps people kind of navigate this pandemic. We have to build resiliency as well in our communities and we do that through helping people through these hard times and making sure that we're moving our services to places where people can access them in any language from wherever they are, right? We're having to actually go into people's homes on their couches to deliver government services where we used to bring them into a single location. Right. Typically public sector has been, has often been seen as lagging behind the private sector in some ways, the pandemic as I'm sure ignited a fire with especially with federal acknowledgement of things that need to happen, budgets flowing. Are you seeing even more of an awakening from a cloud perspective within public sector? We are, we are and we're seeing really interesting initiatives pop up like behavioral health initiatives that are meant to address some really serious concerns in our country like nationwide 988 suicide prevention projects, right? And the federal government is providing a lot of funding to states and local governments so that they can help take care of our communities and also make sure that we're moving our services online so everyone can access them. I'm curious about that point, the funding. Do you find yourself almost in the position of prize patrol where some of the state local governments aren't necessarily as aware as slalom might be of programs that are coming down immediately? Is that part of the conversation? It is part of the conversation. That's a great point because what we do is we look at what's coming down from the federal government, how is it going to flow to the states? How is it going to land ultimately? And then helping them, helping governments come up with a strategy for how to spend that money in the right way is really important, right? And we saw with some of the funding that come out that there were delays on getting like eviction prevention funding out to folks. And so making sure that we have the technology to support those outcomes. It's all about outcomes. Yes. Speaking of outcomes, something I want to congratulate slalom on is winning the first ever national SI partner of the year for the U.S. That's awesome, congratulations. What does that mean for slalom and in what direction can we expect the slalom of the U.S. partnership to go? Up, up. Up to the right. Yes. For us it's about validating the relationship that we have, right? It's really when we walk into a client conversation what we want to do is develop trust that our clients know we're looking for their best interest and their best outcomes. We're not trying to sell them something, we're trying to solve their problems together. And it validates that for us, our partnership with AWS obviously is so important. And what we're doing in terms of making sure that we have a strong bench full of certifications and we can go to market together in the right way for our clients. This is a huge, huge award and the recognition is very powerful for us. Well congratulations. And so last question, you mentioned AWS and we always talk about when we talk with them at their event, we talk about their customer obsession. They work backwards, as you said, from the customer. You guys work from customer vision. Talk to me about when you go in jointly together, work with a customer. What does that alignment look like? Absolutely, so what we typically do is slalom will focus on what is the business outcome that we want to generate and we will help design, how are we going to go about solving that problem and how is AWS going to help support us with enabling technology. And so we will go into client conversations together, say what is the outcome we want from this initiative together and how are both partners going to align to support the client in that conversation, in that product. That alignment is great. And thank you for joining Dave and me today talking about slalom, what you guys are doing, how you're really helping organizations in sled transform and not just survive challenging time but really thrive and be data driven. We appreciate your insights and congratulations again on the national SI partner of the year. Thank you so much. All right, for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage.