 From Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hello everyone, welcome back. This is theCUBE's coverage here for AWS Summit. We are in Bahrain in the Middle East. Cloud computing is changing the game. Telling all the top stories. Cloud computing decrees are now being offered. Amazon's reach is now operational. Our next guest is Mays Rihon, Chief Technology Officer at Aramex, big global provider of logistics and transportation services. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, John, thank you for having me. So you were on a panel this morning. We power tech, it's a women in tech panel. Congratulations. Thank you. But you're also the CTO of a really big logistics and transportation company going to the cloud. Yes. Tell us a story. So I work for Aramex and Aramex is a global leader in transportation logistics. We have, we're proud to have a diverse culture and we have 30% of our management are females. So it's only natural to have a female CTO. But for Aramex, the whole digital transformation journey and the cloud adoption started like all other enterprises with the whole cloud waves started and we found ourselves competing with the corpus that are not competing with the classical competitors from the logistic industry, but rather competing with innovators that are companies that are really consuming the best out of the cloud in terms of speed and agility. So we had to transform and we created digital transformation roadmap and we fired multiple programs and this is how it started. And now we're proud to have a big data lake on AWS and we moved a lot of our business processes to be derived from our machine learning logic that's there. We're modernizing our landscape and moving. So you guys are big logistics, a lot of compute powers needed, a lot of IT, now moving to AWS. Yeah. Which also on a logistics business they move a lot of packages around their business. A lot of compute, a lot of storage, a lot of IT. Why the shift to the cloud? What was the reason? Agility is the most important thing and being able to create MVPs for all the ideas that we might have to support the business, but also furthermore because we needed massive computing power because whenever you're in the services sector the number of transactions that you process and the speed of processing those transactions needs to be tremendous and that's the power of the cloud. Scaling up at the end of the month when you want to invoice with 100K items this is what we were looking for. So digital transformation is complex for you. You have IT, you have your back office, you have a huge organization. IoT must be a big part of it too because you've got to keep track of everything. How big is the IoT or the industrial IoT component of it? Well, for our industry, IoT is very, very relevant. It's going to be transformational on shipment tracking, handling, and it will shift the way we do business. One of the main drivers of building our big data on AWS was the fact that we want to feed IoT findings and sensors reading to the cloud. This is something that we're very serious about. We're actually, I wouldn't say that we haven't seen most of the innovations that are related to that. And I think we had some success stories but for certain sectors like pharmaceuticals and so on but the minute those sensors would be commercialized and feasible enough to be attached to each and every package, we will be the first to... We love talking about Cloud 2.0, a whole new generation is coming. You have compute, you got storage. It's either on-premise or it's going to be in the cloud. The network now is important because it's got 5G and other radio frequency capabilities, tracking, real-time data, do you move compute to the data? So an entire paradigm of computing is shifting. Yeah, we know shifting from the traditional way of doing things where you have your own data centers and the whole communication and networking setup is built to service this architecture of local data centers. Introducing the cloud would be a challenge. How do you connect both of them? But the way we did it, because we were very serious about the cloud move, we prepared right from the beginning. So we knew the locations that we selected for our data centers and how close and how we're going to connect them with our own data centers for the hybrid setup. When we run both, we took it very seriously and we changed the whole ecosystem that comes around. So you got your data lake now, so analytics are important. Yes, data lake, we moved our data lake and we moved our BI as well, reporting to AWS. And we created a layer of logic, data science logic, to derive business processes like your last mile delivery, geocoding, address prediction, as well as understanding market trends and everything. So how's it going with Amazon so far? Good? It's doing very well. We've had this data for so long and it's a wealth of knowledge of the end, specific for our industry. We wanted to bring the best out of it and we could do that. And you have in-house developers. Can you talk a little bit about the dynamic? Is it mostly, you had that for a while, right? Mostly developers? Yes, we do have. For years, actually we've been an in-house development company. We were building our own applications like on a very wide range with very good and strict production and DevOps processes. Now we're shifting our development towards the cloud. We're very open to start developing on AWS and to adopt even low-code platforms, whatever makes us move faster and in a more flexible way. Mayes, you were on the panel with the We Power Tech, Women in Tech, talking about diversity. How has diversity changed with the technology innovation? Actually, the diversity within the workplace is a very significant and important driver for innovation. And we at Aramics, we're very proud and we're considered differentiator and an Aramics edge to be a diverse culture. We have more than 80 nationalities, 30% as I told you, of our management team, our females, that gives you a wealth of knowledge and also allows you to bring in different age groups, different formats of thinking, different knowledge and backgrounds that really makes change management easier and you don't really feel any resistance to progress. Well, you're an inspiration. What advice would you give for women out there watching? Young girls to professional women, looking at their careers, what's your advice? Everything is doable. We understand that we come from a region where there has been cultural challenges. However, I don't see them anymore, especially when you work with big enterprises. If you create a balance at home and gender balance within your family, then you're okay. If you can do that, you can do anything. You can do anything. I have to tell my wife, she's amazing. If you have four kids, she could be the CEO. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your insight. Great stuff. Thank you. Reporting here in Bahrain is theCUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.