 Live from Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hello everyone, welcome back to our live coverage here in Bahrain for theCUBE's exclusive coverage of AWS Summit here in the Middle East and the region. Our first time here, lots of observations, lots of learnings, and also great people we're meeting. I'm John Furrier, your host at theCUBE. Our next guest is Mohamed Aliakharid, who's the Chief Executive of the Information E-Government Authority, also known as IGA. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thank you very much, thank you for hosting me. So you last night at dinner, we were talking about all the opportunities. So the first question I have to ask you is, as you guys have bring in the digital transformation, which is happening, you now have Amazon here with the region, how is that changing things? Of course, always we try to innovate, and the technology, if you don't innovate, if you don't, make sure that you are ready for the changes coming is very difficult. When we announced our first strategy, 2007, we delivered it in 2010 becoming the leader in the region, delivering 200 services over four channels. But as you mentioned, usually in the technology, the longest cycle is the infrastructure and servers and configurations, buying things and configuring. And with the leadership vision of transforming the country, the vision 2030, transformations happening in the judicial system, into the commercial registrations, into the customs, into health and education, you know, the pace of change required and the ambition is very much, much higher. And particularly when you develop something and you were successful. So our leaders said, okay, we are a bit slow, you need to fast things up. So then we looked into the Amazon and the cloud, how it can help us. And usually in Bahrain, we don't have the luxury of trial and error, trying things and if it works and you know, try multiple things. So we have to study it well. This is why we looked into the cloud, what it can bring to the country, the agility, the time to market. And when we put the strategy forward, it was a comprehensive one. Like leaders decided to go cloud first policy, everybody should move because that's the way forward. That's the way that the kingdom can deliver its vision. And that was the cloud first decision. When was that made? That was last year and when it was made, you know, it's not a piece of strategy. You have to look at it in a comprehensive way. You have to look into your laws, legislations, compliance, audit, architectures, policies, skill sets available, the procurement process, the tendering process and you have to review all of that and make sure that there is no show blockers or barriers for the implementation. Otherwise, it will take a long time. This is why in a year time, we managed to migrate huge workloads to the cloud. We were talking last night about how hard it is just to figure out the future. Never mind provisioning all the gear you got to do and the training. And so the cloud first is very interesting, but I also want to just tell you that we talked about also how hard it is. So when I say, oh, go cloud first, it's so easy, right? Not it isn't, there's a lot of work involved. Take us through some of the things that you guys have done. Look, your learnings prior to cloud first and the key learnings now that cloud first has been under your belt for over a year. Of course, always with the governments, the biggest challenge will happen about the security. How I'm going to move, losing the control, putting my processing and storage outside the government. How I'm going to protect it, somebody else is there. That's the biggest challenge, that's number one. Number two, people doesn't understand. They think it's a processing. So okay, I have my processing power, I will save some money, that's not much. But they don't think about the ultimate goal, about the time to market. When you have a new vision, when you have a new service to be delivered, you cannot wait for 18, 24 months for the infrastructure, getting their idol for a couple of years until you know the full utilization of them. So this is why the ultimate goal is much, much bigger. And the thing about the issue of somebody else looking into your- So speed is critical. And you guys have speed under your belt. You did a Formula One race track in what, 14 months I heard. Various fast construction. The Amazon region's going up in record time. Is this a cultural thing, just go fast? People like speed? The need for speed? We like that, the Formula One of course, that's part of our DNA. And our leaders always push the citizens. And that's the Bahraini culture. Yeah, the other thing too about the application now to get back to our serious conversation, to have innovation, you need to have software development go on. In a way that's not the 24 month, well we built it and no one really, you don't know if you tested it or not. But you got to build the DevOps model, infrastructure as code. How far along are you on the infrastructure as code? Because the developer side's going to be very great. Amazon's proven that developers love it, easy to get going, lower cost of test, agility, time to market, time to value. The setup for you guys is a little bit different. You got infrastructure as code, you're not a startup, but you want to act like one. But what do you got to do for the infrastructure? Of course the infrastructure in terms of processing, that's easy because it's been migrated. Most of it's been migrated. Our port are all channels, our mobile channel. The networks, you got 5G, do you have 5G here yet? We're already experimenting, ready for it. The frequencies already freed up for the telcos to utilize them, it's already there for the 5G. Of course fiber is everywhere, all the government entities connected to the fiber. High speed, we have 100, we have a gig, we have 10 gig. We have all kinds of C-development. No problem for bandwidth in the country. I don't think so. We don't have an issue about the bandwidth. And the processing power once moved, then the optimization which already happened. But as you mentioned, coming to the development, we started already developing into the serverless, using the lambdas, you know, born in the cloud concept. That was not there once we started. But now we're already educating and training our employees. What's the reaction to it? The reaction, I mean, it's excellent. I gave an example today about the fingerprint authentication. That's a basic service, but it requires, you know, a huge demand return from all the telcos, all transactions happening in telcos, private hospitals, the banking are coming, any authentication happens. It has to happen in a second. So that requires a huge, massive infrastructure. Once we built it at the beginning for only a few customers, we invested about a quarter of a million dinar at that time. Now, I think, you know, it's been moved completely to serverless concept and new development. So, he's saving. Simple idea, hard to implement in the old way, but the new way you got to wire APIs around, sling APIs and connect devices, telcos environments quickly. So this brings up the integration. This is the benefit of the cloud. The glue layer is what? Microservices, is it APIs? How are you making that lambda function? You know, the APIs and, you know, just you call the service and it gets you to run and then go back to the storage. I mean, a basic thing. But initially, you know, you need a testing environment and you know, development, whatever, and lots of infrastructure. And then you have to secure all of that, secure your data. Now it's, I mean, friction of that cost and much faster go to market. I'm a huge believer in the services model. This is why microservices is a big deal right now in cloud. So if you look at all the cloud native conversations, it's containers, we're using it, no problem. Very good to use containers. They're great. Kubernetes now, orchestration, but dealing with state and stateless applications is now the new challenge because there's so many new services that are spinning up. Soon you're going to be like ordering McDonald's, you know, I'll have a microservice over here. So this is the world you were moving to. This is the services. Exactly. And we would like to build a center of excellence, you know, because we get into this journey. We looked into all of our legislations and the ecosystem, trained our employees. The skill set is very important with the program with Tamkeen. We looked into the training strategy, all the portfolio training, making sure that our Bahrainis have the ability to, you know, to develop, to operate databases and all aspects, even the planning of it. The institutes, partners to be ready to train, you know, the private sector and everybody. You know, Mohamed, I'm really impressed with the entrepreneurial people that I've met. They got a good mojo to them because they're kind of cocky, which I love about, but they're not arrogant. They're like, they're smart. And so I got a good, I see good community there. The question for you is, as you move to cloud native, how's that transition? The young kids get it, I mean, there's no problem. What, where's the progress on the skill set gap? I've heard that conversation. I just don't see it being a problem. If the young kids are, you know, eating up the cloud stuff and like there's nobody's business, then I don't see a problem. What's your take on this skills gap thing? I mean, the guys I met and the entrepreneurs, they're like, they want more action. Exactly, the point is the current employees that we have already, hundreds of government employees that they've been trained in a different environment with a different technologies. I get a couple of questions from some of the professionals in the market, private sector and government sector. How we can benefit out of that? How we can help? We are experts in the field, but okay, cloud for us is the new thing. So as you mentioned, for them, it might be a bit more difficult. So what we did in the IGA, we created a task force of the most brilliant team and told them, okay, you have to migrate the workloads. Train will give you the training and you have to migrate. Go. Next, you have now to optimize. Give the task of migration to somebody else, a new team and the old team, they have to optimize. Third, now you have to work on, you know, born on the cloud, develop on the cloud, you know, create the environment of the cloud and new concept. So that's how we take our- They're spreading the work around through hands-on training. Of course, and you know, you train and then you get them into the action, you know, hands-on and so on, one by one. But eventually the university is already working on the training their students. So we want to make sure that part of the curriculum, the cloud is there. For the new generations to take it from day one. You know, you guys are a learning culture, my observation, first time here, very impressed, very friendly, which is always cool. But it's a multilingual culture. So if you add source code to the new lingua, coding is going to be critical. Are you guys getting at the younger generation really when they're young? How young are you going in terms of the new language? Software? Yep. Thoughts on that? What's that? Starting, of course, from school. Elementary school? From elementary school, trying to get them into the coding, universities as well. And thousands of thousands of... So you are, you guys are teaching kids the code? Of course, and you know, any citizen, they can get any certifications, free of charge. According to the agreement with Tamkeen, Labor Fund, they are willing to train any Bahrainian, any professional certifications, free of charge. That's great. To be ready for the next, and making Bahrainian... So there's no excuses? Of course. There it is. To make Bahrainians a choice for employment. Yeah. You know? If that's the future, we have to make them ready for the future. That's great. And the cloud's going to give you all that energy. Talk about the relationship with Amazon a bit. Amazon Web Services. Obviously, Teresa Carlson really behind this. The whole team, I talk about the company, I see them getting behind and partnering with you guys. It's just, they're not just coming in here and being Amazon. There's a real co-development ethos. Talk about the relationship you have with it. It's impressive, I mean, the way that we work in a partnership way. Everybody should think about the long term, not the short term, you know, part of the partnership that they should help the economy. You know, the Bahrain is for employment, making sure that the economy will benefit out of this move to Bahrain. And as well, we have to help with the legislations, with the regulations, with the, you know, any infrastructure connectivity to the international links, whatever they need, we try to help them because we believe that eventually it will create the ecosystem for the market. Well, I know they opened up a lot of doors for you guys and then for us as well, they attracted us to come and cover the territory here. So we're super excited and I'm so glad we came because I learned a lot. It was been fantastic. Okay, your big idea, final question. What's your big idea that's going to come out of the cloud? It doesn't have to be your idea, in your personal opinion, what is going to happen five years down the road? What is it going to look like? What will this new magic look like? What's the outcome? I think it will be a major restructure and reform in the government. So most of the people working into the routine work, if you know, buying and configuring, buying and configuring, they can be more focused into the real problem about innovation, trying to bring solutions to the problems and issues in the country, trying to develop software that will help the economy to foster and to look at what is required, what is the vision of the leaders, try to implement those. So most of the people who think business before it was like isolation, the technical people, only they have their territory, their environment, looking at the wires and hardware and configurations and somebody else looking into the development and the third group of people who are looking strategically analytics and how to utilize it. So I think what we'd have, we will emerge those people thinking only about the solutions and how to analyze and how to come with the new solutions out of those analytics. And that model has been consolidated, those silos have been broken down with the cloud, brings it all together. Developers are now on the front lines. And they're driving the business. They're the driving the business, coming back to drive. Well, I'm great to have you on, great to see you, thanks for sharing your insight. And congratulations, looking forward to tracking all the great coverage. Amazing opportunity here for everyone in the country and also for Amazon and for us, great to meet new people. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, you can reach me on Twitter at Furrier, F-U-R-R-I-E-R or just search, I'm open. All my channels are open. Telegram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, you name it. Say hello, reach out, stay with us. More all day coverage after this short break.