 Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back everyone, you are watching theCUBE and we are here in our nation's capital at the AWS Public Sector Summit. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, hosting alongside John Furrier. We are joining CUBE alum, Doug Van Dyke, CEO of Inquisit to our show. Thanks so much for coming back on. Well, thank you for having me back. It's good to be here. Well, as I said, you're a CUBE alum. You're also an Amazon alum and there's a story there. So... Sure, well, I'll just do a quick rehash of last year. So I started at AWS in 2012 with the federal business, helped the federal business grow, started the AWS nonprofit vertical, was invited by John and Stu last year to be on theCUBE. The video was a great discussion. The video was seen by some of our best partners and Inquisit, who happens to be one of the best partners that I had in public sector, we started some discussions and later I was hired to be the CEO. So, John, thank you. I didn't know this was going to be a career opportunity for me last year. I wish I could take credit for it. You're the one who's got the job, so you can go through the interviews. Well, I'm glad to help. Absolutely appreciate it. It's all the community, great to have you on. Good, thank you. Thank you for having me back. And you've been with Therese, you've known Therese for many, many years. Microsoft, the public sector game is certainly on fire. You've got Andy Jassy on the fireside chat. Kind of bring in, you can see the frustrations. Like, we've got problems and he's, I never known Andy for many, many years for him to be that animated with his opinion means that it's critical, more than ever now. Where is public sector opportunity right now? Because it seems to be clouds validated. Are we there just a turning moment for the whole public sector community? Yeah, so we're absolutely seeing that in Inquisit. In fact, Inquisit, one of the things I like most about Inquisit is it is focused exclusively on the public sector. So our background is in education. If a student is graduating from high school now and applying to one of the many colleges and universities, they use the common application. We worked with the common app to help build that system that graduating students can apply to multiple universities as opposed to when I was a graduating high school student, I had to fill out the forms, send in a check, wait for it to come back in the mail. Now that's all done online. You can apply to multiple colleges at the same time. So I look at that as one of the first innovations that happened in the public sector on AWS. Inquisit was a part of it. It was one of the things that attracted me to Inquisit. But the innovations, that was in 2009, 2010. It was the beginning. We are just hitting that hockey stick that Andy has talked about in public sector where the federal business, he talked a little bit about the Intel business and how when the agency moved on to AWS it really validated security. I think we've seen the government go in. I think we've seen education and nonprofits. So I think this is the time that public sector is really going to take off in the cloud. Talk about the company that you're leading as the chief now and the product. It's unique from the common app. You talk about the common app that my high school graduates had to fill out and hit send, is that it? That's it, that's it. So I've got some issues with this thing. So, so, we'll do a follow-up. Well, first of all, it's definitely undifferentiated heavy lifting when filling out applications. Automating is great. But it increases the more schools you can apply to. So it creates more inbound applications to schools. It does. I'm sure there's some challenges there that's on the horizon with you guys are solving now. That creates more, I won't say spam, because it's legit. But a lot of schools are like, people throwing in 17 applications now. 20 applications. Well, and it's automated. I mean, technology, so yes, there's more automation, but there's more background, there's more data, and these are data-based decisions. So sure, well, let me start with Inquisit. You asked about Inquisit, 2002, Inquisit started and doing application development. It was in 2009 that we really saw the light to move to AWS, and it was through the work that we were doing with the common app that we realized the scale of handling all these applications, that the paper-based way isn't any easier. In fact, it really restricts the number of colleges that students can apply, and it restricts the number of applicants that colleges get. So with more students applying to more universities and universities receiving more applications, they can be really selective. They have more data sources, more information about the people they're going to bring on, and have a very inclusive and representative university. We have students applying from China and Europe to United States universities. So we're getting a lot of diversity, and I think there's probably a little bit more volume, but that's what technology is getting to. I mean, the data is great, first of all, it's digital data, so that's why I appreciate that. But there's got to be more automation machine learning going in, because now you have a relationship with a student and a school. What's next? What happens next? Well, so the sky's the limit, and you can do, once you've got data, so data reporting is basically limited by the quality of the input data. So you have more students applying with more background information, and you can get really personal. So we helped a large Ivy League university in the Northeast migrate all into AWS. And this was after we worked with the Common App to build the Common Application. We helped this university migrate all into AWS, and we realized that there were benefits and challenges along the way. Some of the challenges we saw were repeatable. So we built a proprietary product called SkyMap, and what SkyMap does is it helps the full migration. So it integrates with your discovery applications like a RISC network, it integrates with AWS CloudEndure, and we were working with CloudEndure before AWS acquired them, so we have APIs there. It manages the whole migration, and your question was you get all this information about an organization's infrastructure. What do you do with it? Well, you use the next step is AIML. So we've used some of the higher level services that Amazon Web Services has with artificial intelligence. We were using Lambda serverless, and we could go there, because I think that's an interesting question. Well, you've got Ken over there at AWS to educate. Oh, yeah. You know, how'd it be great to get a Common App over there at AWS University coming soon? I would, did he mention that? I saw he was on the show before. I'm kind of just riffing on that, but Amazon University. He's got a huge inbound educational thing going on, so education seems to be a big part of the whole themes here. Well, that's our legacy, and we're working with a lot of universities. We're seeing, so you asked, where is the cloud going in the future? We're seeing large universities move all in on AWS because of they're going to get more flexibility. The costs are going to go down. They're going to have more information on the students. They're going to be able to provide better learning. When you're talking to your client, this big Ivy League in the Northeast, what are its pain points? Because college admissions is a controversial topic in the United States, and there's been scandal this year. What, when you were talking with this company, and they said, we want to do this, but what was the problem they were trying to solve? I mean, what were their pain points? Well, one of the first pain points is they were located in a major city, and their data center was in the major city, and this is expensive real estate. And so to use expensive real estate for servers, et cetera, for a data center instead of using it for education is a cost to the university. So very simply put, moving out of that data center, opening that space up for education, and moving into AWS Cloud, say it gave them more space for education, it helped them with cost avoidance, and we had a bunch of lessons learned along the way, so we at the time could move about five servers a week, which may seem like a good number, but now with the automation that we get through SkyMap, our product, we're working with a large group of private universities, as well as Wharton University, and with this large group of private universities, we found we can do, on average, over 20, the best week, we had 37 servers migrate. In higher ed, obviously, they like to be on the cutting edge, but still, they're public sector. Where's the modernization progress on that? And because now you've been on both sides of the table, you were at Amazon Web Services, now you're leading as the CEO of this company in higher ed. How's that modernization going? What's your perspective? What's your observation around? Sure, so first of all, I had the opportunity to go work with a university that's local here last week, and what I love seeing is with this access to the cloud, you've got everyone in the university now has access to nearly unlimited resources for education. They were staffing their own IT help desk with their students, and I love seeing that kind of experience being brought from, you know, someone who used to be an IT professional is now being brought down to a student because of these new technologies are so readily accessible to everybody. So tell us some other things that you're seeing, that you're hearing that are, they're exciting innovations to you in the sector. Yeah, well, another opportunity that we're working with is we worked with the Small Business Administration, and that was pretty rewarding for us as a small business, and three of the applications that we worked on there were, so we are a small A-day, and it used to take our founder, T.C. Ranapuri, about two months, and we had to hire an outside consultant to apply for our small business accreditation. So he was doing the paperwork and all the old school application certification. After we built this application with the Small Business Administration, it took him several hours, he did it by himself, we applied, got the accreditation. So these modernizations are happening both in universities as well as in the federal government. So what's your business plan? You're the CEO now, what's the company's plan, what's your goals? So there's so many things I could talk about. I'll talk about one or two. We see in the next three to five years in public sector that these organizations are going to migrate all in on the cloud. And so we're building up a group, and that's what SkyMap is mainly addressing, is we want to make sure that organizations are able to orchestrate their move to the cloud, and we're going to start exposing the tool that we use for our own internal resources. We're going to start exposing that, leaving that with universities and the federal government, and anyone else who's willing to use it to help them get all in on the cloud. Then we think there's probably going to be a wave where they're trying to learn the cloud and how to operate it. We'll help them as a managed service provider. And then where I'm excited is you go to serverless. And I mentioned we're already using Lambda for our SkyMap product, but we see in the future after the MSP that organizations are going to be serverless and they'll be running in a no ops environment. This is a classic example of sometimes your business evolves in areas you don't know based on the wave you're on. You guys were very proficient at migrating. We are. Now you got SkyMap, which is you're going to take that, those learnings, and they pay it forward, bring it to the market. Bring it back to the market. Absolutely. So people don't have to do that themselves by build kind of thing. Well, and it's a little bit like you're doing here, John, and what AWS has done. Don't tell anyone. No, I'm not telling anyone. I'm only kidding. Tell everybody. Like AWS did, AWS started as a way for Amazon to manage their internal servers. And eventually they realized everyone else in the market can use these same innovations that they've got. Well, I think this proves the point that if you have a SaaS based model with open APIs, you can offer, and pretty much anything as a service, if you get the speed and agility equation right, someone might say, why should, it's not a core company. Why should I buy? I'll just use that service. I hope so. It's the SaaS model. Yeah, and sorry. I was going to say, you were on the inside, now you're on the outside at this conference. What are your impressions? What kinds of conversations are you having that you are going to take back to and quiz it and say, hey, I learned this at the summit, or these people over here are working on something cool. We got to get this in here. Yeah, well, it's been really fun for me as a change of perspective. For the last seven years, I've been helping plan and organize the event and make sure it goes off. And this time I'm a guest. You know, I'm a do-it-it party. I look a little bit more relaxed than last year, because I'm a guest now. But the takeaways are really, the innovation is continuing at AWS and as a partner of Amazon Web Services, I've got to make sure that my team and I stay up-to-date with all of the services that are being released and simplify those. And like John was asking earlier, make sure that there's a strategy for migration support and then continuing to refactor what they're doing. Well, congratulations on the new job. You got a great tailwind with cloud growth, adoption, just in the early days, public sector continuing to astonish the numbers. Next year will be 18,000, 20,000 people. I love it. Soon as like re-invent size, we'll have 30,000 people. This is huge, yeah. Now, it's a pleasure to be here. I'm sure you guys are enjoying it as well. Yeah, I know, it's been great. Doug, thanks so much for returning to theCUBE. Yeah, you're a two-time alum. I love it. I know, I know, thank you. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have more from the Amazon AWS Public Sector Summit coming up in just a little bit.