 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. Hi, and welcome to theCUBE virtual and our coverage of AWS re-invent 2020 with special coverage of the public sector. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Today we have two guests for our segment. We have Kevin McCallum Jr. He is the Chief Technology Officer at Maximus. Thanks for joining us, Kevin. And we have Steve Ziperman, who is the Vice President of Consulting Services at Insight. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Steve. Thank you, Rebecca for having us, appreciate it. So I wanna start by asking you both to tell us a little bit more about your companies. Kevin, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit more about Maximus. Yes, thanks for having me. Maximus is a 40 year old company. We partner with state, federal and local governments to provide communities with critical health and human service programs. We leverage extensive experience to develop high quality services and solutions that are cost effective and tailored to their unique needs. One of the things that we do is offer governments the ability to implement programs rapidly and scalable so that we can focus on the automation and their operations. We do services from Medicare to Medicaid, welfare to work, and we have comprehensive solutions that help the governments run effectively and efficiently. Great, Steve, tell us a little bit about Insight. Yeah, sure. Insight is a Fortune 500 company in 2020 and will roughly do probably eight plus billion dollars in revenue, a global company. We have thousands of strategic relationships, but I'd say we have probably a couple hundred partners we focus on. One of those key partners to us is AWS. As we go to market, as we start working with our customers around the transformation of which we're gonna talk a little bit about that today with Kevin. As it relates to Insight public sector, it's a pretty sizable part of our business. We'll do about a $1.5 billion in revenue. We have 200 plus contract vehicles that will work out there, over 500 plus teammates. And we're seeing that business grow quarter over quarter, 20% growth. So it's a big investment for us. And really looking forward to hearing Kevin talk about Maximus to the team because obviously it's a big lever for us for Insight public sector to get the word out there about the great transformation work we do with our customers. That's a great segue. So let's go back to you, Kevin, and talk a little bit about Maximus' cloud transformation. Why did you hire Insight to help you with this? Yeah, as we started our journey, one of the things we realized is as we were moving to the cloud is the experience we needed a trusted partner. And we ran an RFP process looking for partners out there that have done it that have done major data center programs, you're moving large companies. We're moving about 6,000 workloads, 160 plus applications. So it was not a light or easy project. And Insight fit that. As we went through the interview process, it became very clear that they have done this for Fortune 500 companies in the past. And their experience is beneficial to helping us drive to the future. And the other factors is we wanted to make sure that once we were done with the project, we had the experience internally that they helped us with to drive forward. So talking about the importance of a trusted partner, which is such a key component of digital transformation cloud journeys, tell us a little bit about the strategy tied to the data center transformation and why you chose AWS. Sure. So as we started doing our research, we did analysis across all of the cloud providers that were out there. AWS is a clear leader in the marketplace. Their technology is better aligned with what Maximus has as the underlying technologies. We're a majority of Linux based. We also have Windows, we have Oracle, which with the AWS depth and breadth of our offerings tied better to what we had. The other thing we were looking to do is get rid of our monolithic off the shelf products and use more of the cloud based products that are out there. Amazon has a very deep native technology that allows you to replace your old services where you had to bolt on or purchase another product to something that is integrated in Streamline, down to how do you monitor your systems? How do you do logs, things like that? And as we looked at the timeframe we had to deliver this, they had to be able to grow with us. So as we were building out new infrastructure, we're able to build where previously internally with data centers, you have to buy infrastructure, you wait for it to arrive, you install it. Amazon has it at the click of a button. So we're able to basically have environment stood up in a day rather than having to wait weeks for it. So, and the last thing was uptime. So Amazon, there are five nines plus in uptime. And most of our contracts are three nines or better requirements. So we had to find a vendor that had multiple availability zones and regions that allowed us to be flexible in how we deployed. So talking about the convenience and the ability to Streamline and also the need for flexibility. In the COVID era, of course, the word hybrid work environments has taken on a new meaning, but I wanna ask you about how you see the hybrid era in the long-term affecting Maximus. Yeah, since Maximus is a government contractor we will always be in a hybrid setup. So some of our contracts are very restrictive, especially when you get into IRS, DOD and some of those agencies. You have a FedRAMP requirement as well with some of the federal agencies. So some of those components will have to stay internally. So where we can force, you know, moving to the cloud because of the flexibility we have to deploy that is the route we will go. COVID has introduced a new complexity. When it started back in March, you know, Maximus had 30,000 or so employees and we instantly were thrown into, you gotta make those employees, get those employees to work from home. So we used Amazon's workspace to push our employees to work from home where, you know, some of the employees and some of our contracts are customer owned equipment. So we couldn't actually take that equipment home. So we had to move to a BYOD model on Amazon Workspaces in order to get the users to work from home. And the complexity of that with what Amazon has to offer allowed us to quickly move over 25,000 employees onto Amazon Workspaces and work from home. And then keeping the data center migration moving in the middle of it has also been a challenge. So we will, and our federal space still have internal data centers. The integration points that Amazon offers with their interconnects is key to how we make it a seamless process because we may have a business unit that has stuff sitting in the data center and at Amazon and they have to look as a seamless package. Steve, I want to bring you in here a little bit into this conversation. Cloud transformation, digital transformation, these are difficult and huge undertakings in the best of times. How does this pandemic, this health crisis, emergency, how has that affected the way you help your clients, the way you work with your clients, collaborate, communicate? Talk a little bit about the effect of COVID on this. So I would, I'll answer the questions a couple of different ways. So I would agree with Kevin because forget about what we do with our customers. We had to pivot it really quick too, right? All remote workforce. I think about my team, 1,000 plus teammates, everyone's 80% travel, all of them think of an I, right? So everybody work in remote, everybody work from their homes. And but the challenging part was working with their customers. And I look at, I look at with Kevin, I've never met Kevin in person, frankly. And there's teammates that have come on to the project and executing this program remotely. So it makes it that much harder working with a customer, you know, doing more video chats, you know, our methodology is built to be all remote. We have a proprietary tool called SnapStart that allows us to be able to scan environments, all that things done remote, migrations can be done remote. The hard part is when you have to go on site because there's stuff you have to go on site for around physical inventory to look at the equipment. But it just makes it that much harder. You know, I think he's taking advantage of these video tools like we're doing today. You know, I can't tell me how many Skype, you know, how many calls I've been on with Kevin like this and with his peers and with his leadership. But communication is really important to program like this because you know, in a program like this, there will be problems, right? And there will be challenges. And, you know, getting on a call and being able to look at Kevin face to face and see what his reaction is really key. But you got to work that much harder. You got to work that much harder now in the pandemic. You know, I have other projects right now I'll leave it with this other projects that frankly we have sold all remote and we're doing it all remote. And what I'm seeing with the pandemic is an acceleration of digital transformation. So other similar projects like we're doing with Kevin, we're doing rather large Fortune 500 companies because it's an acceleration of, hey, look, we got to be all digital now. So it'll be interesting to see, you know, how the pandemic affects us long-term because it is definitely accelerating out their digital transformation. If you haven't done it, you're in trouble because it's going to eat your company alive. So Kevin, he's taught, he talked a little bit about, the importance of communication, particularly when so many people are working from home. Talk a little bit about other best practices that have emerged, things that you have noticed, things that you advice you would have to your peers. I mean, as we heard from Steve, if you're not there yet, you're in trouble. But for the people, for the executives out there who are watching this, what advice would you have for them? Yeah, I think that, you know, this is brought to light. You know, there was always a view that you had to be in an office, on a whiteboard, and actually functioning in that fashion. So, you know, before the pandemic, I was traveling three weeks a month. And now not traveling, I feel that I actually get more work done. I actually feel that I'm closer to the team just because we've introduced a lot of different digital channels. So now we have Slack, we have Teams, we do Zoom. I require everybody to be on video whereas previously before the pandemic, you'd rarely have anybody on video. And you've seen a transformation is people pick up the phone a lot quicker than they did in the past. So it is actually, I believe, brought the team closer together because now, you know, everybody's on. The downside of it is everybody's on all the time. So you've also had to have people step away from work because generally when they take PTO, they leave the office, they go somewhere with their family. Now it's, you're kind of at home, there's not much to do and you kind of have to force them to take the time off. One of the major factors that has been interesting is we're doing this transformation in the middle of COVID with moving all of our resources to home. So we've had to take pauses to focus on getting everybody to work from home. Okay, now they're work from home, back to the project. And you know, it's kind of changed the timeline a little bit, but in the end, we have some hard deadlines to meet. So it's been an interesting transition. You know, Kevin, I want to agree with you two points is, you know, I think we're also getting not only your time but also senior leadership that I think frankly, we never would have gotten. You know, I've talked and, you know, your peers and your leadership, like I would fly for those meetings. I think about all the time that I've saved, but then again, it never ends, right? And never, it begins and never ends. And you know, one of the things I'm concerned about is, you know, the long-term burnout factor for these folks because depending on what state you're in, it never ends. You don't have anywhere to go, right? And you know, I think about teammates. I think, you know, Kevin and I have talked about this related to our project, like burnout's a real thing right now, for sure. Eight, nine months into this thing, it's a real thing as people only have to focus on is work sometimes. So it's a concern for all of us as a project team as we start to look at the executing, continuing to execute this program for the next year. And it really highlights the importance of visionary leadership and a leader who cares, who's empathetic, who is checking in with his or her team and making sure that the colleagues feel appreciated and cared for. I want you both to just give us, look into your crystal balls a little bit and talk about the, where you see things, 12, 24 months for now, hopefully there will be a vaccine and we will return to somewhat of a new normal. Talk a little bit about where you see the maximus transformation in two years. Absolutely. Yeah, start with you. So, our cloud migration, we have some hard deadlines through next year. So we have a focus with Insight to get that completed by September of next year because our data center contracts are up and we've got to get out. One of the advantages of where we're headed is to move into more of a DevOps model where you're able to enable groups that have previously not been able to do work just due to the way the infrastructure was set up. You're now enabling them to do deployments, get into production and to have full stack ownership. That's really where our focus is, is the enablement of the teams that couldn't do the work previously because now you're in a different type of environment. The other thing is being able to be more agile. So as we move forward into the cloud journey, we as a company can start contracts quicker. We are part of the contract tracing and unemployment insurance. We've done a lot of contracts with the states that previously most of our contracts are anywhere from a 60 to 120 day startup. These contract and contact tracing and COVID projects, we've had to start them up in three days. That's having 500 employees online, on workspaces, on Genesis Cloud and fully functional. And it has been a challenge, but it also has introduced a better way to do business because now we can move quicker for our customers and we can get contracts where they come and say, hey, I need something in the next couple of days. If you look further down the road, it's taking the advantage of what Amazon has to offer. Moving from our more monolithic programs like we sit on Oracle on Linux today, we can move into Aurora, which opens up the doors and plug gates because then you manage VR a little bit differently, you manage your data a little differently. That's really where I think the market's going and where we can actually transform our business even better to where we can be more flexible, we can start up quicker and do more things for our customers. Eve, final words from you. I think it's going to be a hybrid world, at least in the short term. And we believe it's all about the workload and getting those workloads or applications in the right spot where there'd be public or private and helping our customers with that journey, just to pile on with what Kevin talked about around DevOps. Once you get all the stuff over there, you still got to manage it, whether it's in AWS or on-prem, you still got to have a process to do that. So we see a lot of opportunity around modern IT operations and helping with that. And we want to continue to be a trusted partner to Maximus. It's been a great relationship and I want to thank Kevin and his leadership team for trusting in us. And we look forward to more success with him in the future. Excellent, thank you both so much. Kevin and Steve, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Absolutely. Thank you. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE virtual coverage of AWS re-invent with special coverage of the public sector.