 Hello, and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm Natalie Ehrlich, your host for theCUBE, and I'm delighted to present our guests. They are Jose Montero, CEO at Jutec, Decentro America and Rafael Ramirez, Product Manager, Costa Rica Ministry of Education. Welcome gentlemen to today's session. Thank you, Natalie. Gracias, Natalie. Well, let's start with Rafael. Please tell us about some of the key challenges that are affecting the Ministry of Education in Costa Rica. One of the main challenges was to be able to have a product that is always available to schools that is easy to use for schools and at the same time that the product should be user friendly, that is you didn't need so much training for schools to use it. A few things that we thought of was to consider our client because schools have a very limited connectivity so we could not use very highly tech technologies because that required very huge broadband and our clients, the schools would be subject to a service that was not available to them. So one of the main things was to consider the client and how to reach them. Thanks to Edutek, the Ministry made an alliance with a company that thought about the innovation and they recommended different services that we can provide with a cloud, through the cloud so that we are able to get to take the service to deliver the service to our clients and then they can use the platform that we are building in an easy way and at the same time to take care of the quality they need. Something important about schools was that while they were using the product they were getting benefit. That made schools to be willing to participate. Terrific. Well, Jose, I'd love it if you could give us some insight on some of the services that you are providing to the Ministry. Sure, so when the Ministry approached us and we had the opportunity to work with them, of course as an AWS partner we thought, well, this couldn't be better, right? So we started to think on all of the different services that AWS offers in the cloud to provide to the Ministry to be able to reach this gap that has been for a long time where you see still people using Excel, using access, Microsoft access as databases instead of using all of the energy and all of the power that the cloud has. So when we approached to them and we were able to show all of these different services that AWS could provide to the Ministry of Education it was a perfect marriage. So we started to work with them and I think it's been awesome. This is only the first part of a project of eight stages. We are currently working on stage two and stage three which will come in August and in January of 2020, 2022. But we're super happy to see just in this first phase everything that has come and all of the data that has come to help the Ministry of Education in order to take a action in the students' lives. Yeah, that's really terrific to hear. I'd love to hear from Rafael further about why he thinks it was so important to have cloud data at the Ministry of Education level. Okay, I will give you an important example for us. In our country, we would rather gather the collect data in paper and take that to the central office and this would enter it into an Excel file. This would take around two months to process all this data and make decisions. When we started with the first service which was to record the number of employees of the students, we could pay teachers on time. We could get the number of students and know where we had the biggest needs. So this would make a very innovative solution. And when the pandemic started, we had the first active service. This allowed us to react very quickly and we realized that in the first quarter, 90,000 students were not in our schools because we were from a face-to-face service to a virtual service. So we could react very quickly. We planned a strategy with the Ministry of Education that was to come back. That is the idea was to locate where students were and in the next four months, we could reduce the dropout from 90 students to 18,000 students. After that, we initiated another stage to retrieve those 18,000 students back to school. These were thanks to having the information online in some countries that may not have this problem. This might be very little, but for us, this was very, very important because we were able to reach the poorest households so as to bring those students back to the school. Terrific, well, that's really fantastic. You know, in a non-COVID world, how do you think this technology will really help you to enhance education within Costa Rica? Sí, aquí hay algo importante. This is important. In the idea of this innovative product for us has a strategy of having a single file of the student. This allows us to do a follow-up of what the student has done during the different school years and we can identify their lacks, their weaknesses and we can see which are the programs that are more appropriate so as to replicate this in the rest of the country without a centralized file like we have now. We are looking to have this traceability of students so as to strengthen our weaknesses and replicate our strength in the rest of the educational system. One of the most important things is this technological unit, this implementation not only reached primary school students but also preschool, kindergarten, primary school, secondary school, higher education, technical education. So we've reached every single sector where the Ministry of Education was able to detect where there was a need in the country. Yeah, terrific. Well, I'd love to hear more from our other guest, Jose Montero, CEO of Adyutek Central America. If you could give us more insight, more depth on the services that you provide, you talked about like an eight-step plan if you could just highlight those eight steps. Sure, so part of this eight stages that we're going to be developing and we hope that we'll be working with the Ministry of Education in every single one of them, it cause or it brings a lot of technologies. For example, there's one that we're planning on using which is recognition from AWS. The fact of, there's a lot of students that come to the country that have no documentations. There's no passports, there's no a document ID, there's nothing, right? So it's really hard for within the same school system to be able to track these students, right? Because they can go, they can come and they can, if they want, they can change their name. They can do a lot of things that maybe are not correct. And sometimes it's not even because they wanna do something incorrect, it's just that the system or the way of doing things manually allows us to do these type of changes. So for example, with the service like recognition, I've been able to recognize their face or recognize their ID with their fingerprints and being able to interact and give an actual recognition as the word says to this student. It's amazing, it's amazing technology that allows the ministry of education and the students to have a voice, to have a presence, even though they don't have their actual documentation because of whatever reason, there is something behind this that helps them be valuable and be at the same time present in the system, right? And so with not only that, but with the grading, with the attendance, with the behavior, with a lot of things that we're creating within these stages, it's gonna be, for example, let me give you a quick example. There's, for example, the system that we've created for the dropouts, the student doesn't come one day, two days, three days and automatically now it'll become an alert and it will start boom, boom, boom, boom, boom to shot emails and alerts to the different people involved in order to see, hey, listen, this student has not come for the last week to classes. We need you to go and see what's going on, right? So this is, maybe it is something very small, but it can change people's life and it can change students' lives. And the fact of knowing where they are, how they are, how are they doing, how their grades are, where we can help them and activate these different types of alerts that the system allows them to do that, it helps incredibly the life of the student and the future of this student. And that is exactly what we're trying to do here. At the end it's not only, it's okay, all of the technological and all of the different efforts that we're doing, but at the end, that's what it matters. It's the student, right? It's the fact that he can come and he can finish his school, he can graduate, he can go to college, he can become an entrepreneur and be some day here at AWS conference and give him a conference. And that is exactly what the Ministry of Education is looking at and what we are looking at the project per se. Yeah, I mean, that's a really excellent point that you're making. I mean, this technology is helping real people on the ground and actually shaping their lives for the better. So, I mean, it's really incredible. You know, I'd love to hear more now from Rafael just a bit. What insight he can provide to other ministries who, you know, also, you know, ministries of education who also would consider implementing this kind of technology and also his own experience with this project in AWS. Gracias. Sí, la interconexión para nosotros. Well, the connectivity for us is really important not only within the institutions of the Ministry of Education, but we also have connections with the Ministry of Health. We also have connections with a software called CN Madura, which allows the identification of people within the country and the benefits provided by the state. So the country, little by little, is incorporating these cloud services. We have found that before we developed everything AWS has a set of services that allow us to focus on the problem and instead of on the solution or the technology because services are already available. So at the country level, other ministries are incorporating these services. Now it is for COVID management, the Ministry of Health has a set of applications that allow to set links between people that test positives. So this has allowed us to associate the situation with that particular student in our classrooms. So little by little, these services are converting education and other services into a need that allows us to focus on the problem instead of on technological solutions because services are already there for us to consume. Terrific. I'd love to now shift to our other guest, Jose. Could you give us some insight? What is the next phase for your business? When you look at 2021, it's going to be, I mean, we hope it's going to be a wonderful year post COVID, what's your vision? It's interesting that you're saying that Natalie. Education has changed. COVID has put an acceleration to, has accelerated the whole shift of the technological change in education. It will not, well, I hope, it will not go back to the same before COVID. All of these technologies that are being created, that are being organized, that are being developed for education specifically, an area where everything has been done the same for a long time. We need it. It's crazy to say this, but we needed a COVID time in order to accelerate this type of organizations, right? And now like ministries of education, like the minister of education of Costa Rica, they've had this for a long time and they've been thinking of the importance of making changes and everything, but until now it became a priority. Why? Because they realized that without these technologies with another pandemic, oh boy, we're going to see the effects of this and it's going to affect a lot of countries and a lot of students. But it's going to help to accelerate and understand that, for example, internet, it has to be a worldwide access just like water or electricity is in our countries right now. The fact of a student not having internet, we're taking away a lot of development for this student. So I believe that after this post-COVID time, education is going to continue to do a lot of changes and you'll see this and you'll see this in all of the areas, in elementary, in preschool, in university, in high school, you're going to see the changes that this is starting to do and we've seen it and we've seen it, but now it's going to be at a two, three or four X. So we're pretty excited. We're pretty excited about what the world, what the world's going to bring to this table and to this specific area, which is education. That's really terrific to hear a silver lining in this pandemic and just real quick, final thoughts from Rafael, are you looking to ramp up further in light of what Jose has said, to ramp up the digital transformation process? Yes, I believe this is an opportunity. The country is facing the opportunity, the resistance that we had in the sector of education, the current emergency situation and the need to use virtual tools have flattened these curves and nowadays since 2020, Costa Rica started a very strong, teach the trainer courses that every four years ago, it was very difficult to set, to involve all teachers, but nowadays all teachers want to get trained. So we are getting there with virtual trainings, with new tools, with the implementation and the use of technology in the classroom. So these kind of emergencies, somehow we have to, we know the pain, but we know that also the gain of this whole idea, of this whole situation. So this opportunity for change is something that we have to take advantage of thanks to these cloud services. I believe this is nowadays available and the country realize that these things are closer than what we thought of. And innovation is here to stay and I believe we have to exploit this a little by little. Terrific. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for your insights. Loved hearing about the innovations taking place in the classroom, especially overseas in Costa Rica. And that of course was Rafael Ramirez, the product manager Costa Rica Ministry of Education, as well as Jose Montero, the CEO of Edgertek Decentral America. And of course, I'm Natalie Orlick, your host for theCUBE for today's session for the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. Thanks very much for watching.