 Hello, and welcome to the special CUBE presentation of the AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards Program. Here with the leader of the partner program, Sandy Carter, vice president at AWS, Amazon Web Services at Sandy underscore Carter on Twitter, prolific on social and a great leader. Sandy, great to see you again and congratulations on this great program we're having here. In fact, thanks for coming on for this keynote. Well, thank you, John, for having me. You guys always talk about the coolest thing, so we have to be part of it. Well, one of the things that I've been really loving about this success of public sector, we talked to us before, is that as we start coming out of the pandemic, it's becoming very clear that the cloud has helped a lot of people and your team has done an amazing work. Just want to give you props for that and say congratulations. And what a great time to talk about the winners because everyone's been working really hard in public sector because of the pandemic. The internet didn't break and everyone stepped up with cloud scale and solved some problems. So take us through the award winners and talk about them, give us an overview of what it is, the criteria and all the specifics. Yeah, you got it. So we've been doing this annually and it's for our public sector partners overall to really recognize the very best of the best. Now, we love all of our partners, John, as you know, but every year we like to really hone in on a couple who really leverage their skills and their ability to deliver a great customer solution. They demonstrate those Amazon leadership principles like working backers from the customer, having a bias for action. They've engaged with AWS in very unique ways and as well, they've contributed to our customer success, which is so very important to us and to our customers as well. That's awesome. Hey, can we pick up a slide? I know we have slide on the winners. I want to look at them with the tiles here. So here's a list of some of the winners, actually nice little stars on there. They'll get the gold star. I know it's Iron Net, CrowdStrike, that's General Keith Alexander's company. I mean, super relevant. Presidio, we've interviewed them before many times. Got Palantir in there. And is there another one? I want to take a look at some of the other names here. Well, overall, we had 21 categories. You know, we have over 1,900 public sector partners today. So you'll notice that the awards, we did a big focus on mission. So things like government education, healthcare. We spotlighted some of the brand new technologies like containers, artificial intelligence, Amazon Connect. And we also this year added in awards for innovative use of our programs like Think Big for Small Business and PTP as well. Yeah, well, great, great roundup there. Looking forward to hearing more about those companies. I got to have to ask you because this always comes up. We're seeing more and more ecosystem discussions when we talk about the future of cloud. And obviously we're going to, you know, be at Mobile World Congress to the Cube back in physical form. Again, Cube Verge will continue to go on. The notion of ecosystem is becoming a key competitive advantage for companies and missions. So I have to ask you, why are partners so important to your public sector team? Talk about the importance of partners in context to your mission. Yeah, you know, our partners are critical. We drive most of our business and public sector through partners. They have great relationships. They've got great skills. And they have, you know, that really unique ability to meet the customer needs. If I just highlighted a couple of things, even using some of our partners who won awards, the first is, you know, migrations are so critical. Andy talked at ReInvent about still 96% of applications still sitting on premises. So anybody who can help us with the velocity of migrations is really critical. And I don't know if you knew, John, but 80% of our migrations are led by partners. So for example, we gave awards to Calibra and Databricks as best led migration for data as well as data com for best data led migration as well. And that's because they increase the velocity of migrations which increases customer satisfaction. They also bring great subject matter expertise in particular around that mission that you talked about. So for instance, GDIT won best mission solution for federal. And they had just an amazing solution that was a secure virtual desktop that reduced a federal agency's deployment process from months to days. And then finally, you know, our partners drive new opportunities and innovate on behalf of our customers. So we did award this year for P2P partnering to partners which is a really big element of ecosystems. That was one by four points and inquisit and they were able to work together to implement a data lake and an AIML solution. And then you just did the startup showcase. We had the best startup delivering innovation too. And that was EduTech, they sent to America and they won for implementing an amazing student registration and early warning system to alert risks that may impact a student's educational achievement. So those are just some of the reasons why partners are important. I could go on and on. As you know, I'm so passionate about my partners. And you can go on for an hour. I've got to cut you off a little there because you'd love your partners so much. I do have to focus on this mission thing. It was a strong mission focus in the awards this year. Why are customers requiring much more of a mission focused? Is it because, is it a part of the criteria? I mean, we're seeing a mission being big. What's your, why is that the case? Well, you know, IDC said that IT spend for a mission or something with a purpose or line of business was five times greater than IT. We also recently did our CTO study where we surveyed thousands of CTOs. And the biggest and most changing elements today is really not around the technology, but it's around the industry, healthcare space that we talked about earlier or government. So those are really important. So for instance, new, new reburial, they won best mission for healthcare. And they did that because of their new smart diagnostic system. And then we had a partner when PA consulting for best Amazon connect solution around a mission for providing support for those most at risk, the elderly population, those who already had preexisting conditions. And really making sure they were doing what they called risk shielding during COVID, really exciting and big strong focus on mission. Yeah, and it's also, you know, we've been covering a lot on this. People want to work for a company that has purpose and that has missions. I think that's going to be part of the table stakes going forward. I got to ask you on the secrets of success. When this came up, I love asking this question because, you know, we're starting to see the playbooks of what I call post COVID and cloud scale 2.0, whatever you want to call it. You're starting to see this new modern era of success formulas. Obviously large scale value creation, mission. These are points we're hearing in CUBE conversations across the board. What do you see as the secret of success for these partners? Obviously it's indirect for Amazon, I get that. But they also have their customers, they're your customers' customers. That's been around for a while, but there's a new model emerging. What are the secrets from your standpoint of success? You know, it's so interesting, John, that you asked me this because this is the number one question that I get from partners too. I would say the first secret is being able to work backwards from your customer, not just technology. So take one of our award winners, Cognizant. They won for their digital tolling solution and they work backwards from the customer on how to modernize that. Or Paravita, who is one of our best energy solution winners. And again, they looked at some of these major capital projects that oil companies were doing, working backwards from what the customer needed. I think that's number one, working backwards from the customer. Two is having that mission expertise. So given that you have to have technology, but you also got to have that expertise in the area, we see that as a big secret of our public sector partners. So education, Cognizant one for education, effectual one for government and not for profit, Accenture one, really leveraging and showcasing their global expansion around public safety and disaster response, very important as well. And then I would say the last secret of success is building repeatable solutions using those strong skills. So Deloitte, they have a great solution for migration, including mainframes. And then you mentioned early on CloudStrike and IronNet, just think about the skill sets that they have there for repeatable solutions around security. So I think it's really around working backwards from the customer, having that mission expertise and then building a repeatable solution leveraging your skill sets. That's a great form of success. I got to, you mentioned IronNet and cybersecurity. One of the things that's coming up is in addition to having those best practices, there's also like real problems to solve like ransomware is now becoming a government and commercial problem, right? So obviously seeing that happen a lot in DC, that's a front burner. That's a societal impact issue. That's like a cyber security, kind of national security defense issue, but also it's a technical one. And also in public sector, through my interviews, I can tell you the past year and a half, there's been a lot of creativity of new solutions, new problems or new opportunities that are not yet identified as problems. And I'd love to get your thoughts on what my colleagues with Jeff Barr yesterday from AWS, who's been blogging all the news and he's a leader in the community. He was saying that he sees like 5G in the edge as new opportunities where it's creative. It's like he compared it to going to the home improvement store where he just goes to buy one thing and he does other things. And so there's a builder culture. And I think this is something that's coming out of your group more because the pandemic forced these problems and they forced new opportunities to be creative and to build. What's your thoughts? Yeah, so I see that too. So if you think about builders, you know, we had a partner executive council yesterday. We had 900 executives sign up from all of our partners and we asked them survey questions, like what are you building with today? And the number one thing was artificial intelligence and machine learning. And I think that's such a new builders tool today, John. And you know, one of our partners who won an award for the most innovative AI and ML was a Kablemo. And what they did was they used AI and ML to do a risk assessment on bushfires or wildfires in Australia. But I think it goes beyond that. I think it's building for that need. And this goes back to, we always talk about hashtag tech for good, Presidio. I love this award that they won for best nonprofit. The Cherokee Nation, which is one of our, you know, Native American heritage, they were worried about their language going out, like completely out, like no one being able to speak it. And so they came to Presidio and they asked, how could we have a virtual classroom platform for the Cherokee Nation? And they created this game that's available on your phone, so innovative, so much of a builder's culture to capture that young generation so they don't, you lose their language. So I do agree. I mean, we're seeing builders everywhere. We're seeing them use artificial intelligence, containers, security, and we're even starting with quantum. So it is pretty powerful of what you can do as a public sector partner. I think the partner equation is just so wide open because it's always been based on added adding value, right? So adding value is just what they do. And by the way, you make money doing it if you do a good job of adding value. And again, I just love riffing on this because Dave and I talk about this on the cube all the time and it comes up all the time in cloud conversations. The lock-in isn't proprietary technology anymore, it's value and scale. So you're starting to see builders thrive in that environment. So really good points, great best practice and I think I'm very bullish on the partner ecosystems in general, if people do it right, it's a lot upside. I got to ask you though, going forward because this is the big post COVID kind of conversation. And last time we talked on the cube about this, people want to have a growth strategy coming out of COVID. They want to have a tailwind. They want to be on the right side of history. No one wants to be on the losing end of this, all this. So last year in 2021, your goals were very clear, mission, migrations, modernization. What's the focus for the partners beyond 2021? What are you guys thinking to enable them? 21 is going to be a nice on ramp to this post COVID growth strategy. What's the focus beyond 2021 for you and your partners? Yeah, it's really interesting. We're going to actually continue to focus on those three M's, mission, migration and modernization, but we'll bring in different elements of it. So for example, on mission, we see a couple of new areas that are really rising to the top. Smart cities, now that everybody's going back to work and costs have to go down. Operations and maintenance and global defense and using gaming and simulation. Think about that digital twin strategy and how you're doing that. For migration, one of the big ones we see emerging today is data-led migration. We had been focused on applications and mainframes, but data has gravity. And so we are seeing so many partners and our customers demanding to get their data from on-premises to the cloud so that now they can make real-time business decisions. And then on modernization, we talked a lot about artificial intelligence and machine learning. Containers are wicked hot right now. It provides you portability and performance. I was with a startup last night that just knew everything they're doing to ECS, our container strategy. And then we're also seeing, Crip-in, Quantum, Blockchain, No Code, Low Code. So the same big focus, mission, migration, modernization, but the underpinnings are going to shift a little bit beyond 2021. That's great stuff. And you have, first of all, people might not know that your group and partners in Amazon Web Services Public Sector has a big surface area. You talking about government, healthcare, space. So I have to ask you guys announced in March the Space Accelerator and you recently announced that you selected 10 companies to participate in the Accelerator program. So, I mean, this is a space-centric, targeting low earth, orbiting satellites to exploring the surface of the moon and Mars, which people love. And because the space is cool, let's face it, tech and space, they kind of go together, right? So take us through what's this all about? How's that going? What was the selection? Can you just a quick update while you're here on this Space Accelerator selection? Because now Werner Vogue had a big blog post that went out announcing this. Yeah, I would be thrilled to do that. So I don't know if you know this, but when I was young, I wanted to be an astronaut. We just helped through Maxar, one of our partners, Reach Mars. So Clint, who is a retired general and myself got together and we decided we needed to do something to help startups accelerate in their space mission. And so we decided to announce a competition for 10 startups to get extra help, both from us as well as a partner, Sarah Pham, on space. And so we announced it. Everybody expected the companies to come from the US, John. They came from 44 different countries. We had hundreds of startups enter and we took them through this six week classroom education. So we had our general Clint helping and teaching them in space, which he's done his whole life. We provided them with AWS credits. They had mentoring by our partner Sarah Pham and we just down selected to 10 startups. That was what Werner's blog post was. If you haven't read it, you should look at some of the amazing things that they're going to do from farming asteroids to helping with some of the, using small vehicles to connect to larger vehicles when we all get to space. It's very exciting, very exciting indeed. You have so much good content areas and partners exploring it. So very wide vertical or sector that you're managing. Is there any pattern, while I got you, I want to get your thoughts on post COVID success again. Is there any patterns that you're seeing in terms of the partner ecosystem, whether it's business model or team makeup or mindset or just how they're organizing that's been successful. Is there like a, do you see a trend? Is there a certain thing? I know I've got the working backwards thing. I get that, but like, is there any other observations because I think people really want to know, am I doing it right? Am I being a good manager? We know people are going to be working remotely more. We're seeing more of that. And it's going to be now virtual events, hybrid events, physical events. The world's coming back to normal, but it's never going to be the same. Do you see any patterns? Yeah, you know, we're seeing a lot of small partners that are making an entrance and solving some really difficult problems. And because they're so focused on a niche, it's really having an impact. So I really believe that that's going to be one of the things that we see, a focus on individual creators and companies who are really tightly aligned and not trying to do everything, if you would. I think that's one of the big trends. I think the second, we talked about it a little bit, John, I think you're going to see a lot of focus on mission because of that purpose. You know, we've talked about hashtag tech for good with everything going on in the world. As people have been working from home, they've been re-evaluating who they are and what do they stand for? And people want to work for a company that cares about people. I just posted my human footer on LinkedIn and I got my first over a million hits on LinkedIn, just by posting this human footer, saying, you know what? Reply to me at a time that's convenient for you, not necessarily for me. So I think we're going to see a lot of this purpose-driven mission that's going to come out as well. Yeah, and I also noticed that, and I was on LinkedIn, I got a similar reaction when I started trying to create more of a community model, not so much have people attend our events and we need butts in the seats. It was much more personal. Like we wanted you to join us, not attend and be like a number. You know, people want to be part of something. This can be the new mission. Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think that, you know, people do want to be part of something and they want, they want to be part of the meaning of something too, right? Not just be part of something overall, but to have an impact themselves personally and individually, not just as a company. And I think, you know, one of the other trends that we saw coming up too was the focus on technology. And I think low code, no code is giving a lot of people entry into doing things they never thought they could do. So I do think that technology, artificial intelligence, containers, low code, no code, blockchain, those are going to enable us to even do greater mission-based solutions. Low code, no code reduces the friction to create more value. Again, back to the value proposition. Adding value is the key to success. Your partners are doing it. And of course, being part of something great like the global public sector partner awards list is a good one. And that's what we're talking about here. Sandy, great to see you. Thank you for coming on and sharing your insights and an update and talking more about the 2021 global public sector partner awards. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, John. Always a pleasure. Okay. The global leaders here presented on theCUBE, again, award winners doing great work in mission modernization, again, adding value. That's what it's all about. That's the new competitive advantage. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.