 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS re-invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for AWS re-invent 2019. This is theCUBE's seventh year covering re-invent that been doing this show for eight years. We missed the first year. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante, extracting the signal from the noise and we're here with an amazing guest, a friend. She's been here with us from the beginning of theCUBE since inception. Always great to get the commentary. Sandy Carter, vice president with Amazon Web Services. Now in the public sector, handling partners. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on again and sharing your content. So great to see you guys. So dressed up and looking good, guys, I have to say. You looking good too. But I can't help but stare at our other guest here, the IoT suitcase. First, tell us about the IoT suitcase. Well, we, in public sector, we have a partner program and that program helps entrepreneurs and we're really keen on, especially helping female entrepreneurs. So one of our entrepreneurs created this suitcase. That's an IoT based suitcase. You can put your logos and that sort of thing on it. But more importantly, for public sector, she created the safety ring, John. And so if I touch it, I've deactivated it, but if I touch it, it will call the police for me if I'm being assaulted or if I have an emergency, I can touch it and have an ambulance come for me as well. And the really cool thing about it is she worked backwards from the customer, figuring out like, how are most people assaulted? And if you have an emergency and you fall, what's the best way to get hold of someone? It's not your phone because you don't always carry it. It's for a device like this. Or a bigger device that you can't, you leave in the table somewhere, but that's, you know, it's attractive and it booms. Yeah, and it's pink. Yeah, yeah. What I love fast about reinventing in advance is that there's so much innovation going on, but one of the areas that's becoming modernized very rapidly is the public sector. You're now in this area, there's a lot of partnerships with a huge ecosystem going, and the modernization effort is real. Could you share some commentary on what's going on, give people a feel for the pace of change, what's accelerating, what are people doubling down on, what are some of the dynamics in the public sector? Yeah, so if you know public sector, public sector actually has a lot of Windows or Microsoft workloads in it. And so we're seeing a lot of public sector customers looking to modernize their Windows workloads. In fact, we made several announcements just yesterday around helping more public sector customers modernize. For example, one is Windows Server 2003 and 2008 will go out of support, and so we have a great new offering with technology that can help them to not refactor that actually abstract those layers and move quickly to 2016 and 2019, because both of those will go out of support in January. A lot of people don't know, and I learned this from talking to Andy Jassy and hearing in the keynote, as well as hearing from some other folks, is that Amazon runs a lot of Windows. Oh, we have 57% Windows workloads on AWS in terms of market segment share, which is 2X, the next nearest cloud provider, 2X. And most customers choose to run their Windows workloads on us because we're so innovative, we move really fast. We're more reliable, the latest public data from 2018 shows that the next nearest cloud provider had seven times more downtime. So if you're in public sector or even commercial, who can afford to be down that long? And then finally, we have better security. So one of the things we've been focused on for public sector is FedRAMP solutions. We now have over 90 solutions that are FedRAMP ready, which is four times more than the next two cloud providers. Four times more than the two combined. That's interesting. So I got to answer the question that's popping in my mind. I'm sure people are curious about. I get the Windows working on Amazon, that makes a lot of sense. Why wouldn't you want to run on the best cloud? The question I would have is, how do the licensing work? Because that seems to be a lock-in spec. Oracle does it, Microsoft does it, license has become the lock-in. So when something expires, what happens on the licensing side? Yeah, licensing is really tricky. And in fact, October 1st, Microsoft made some new licensing changes. And so we have some announcements to help our customers still bring their own licenses, or we call it fondly BYOL, over to AWS. So they don't have to double invest in the license. So you can honor that license on AWS? Yeah, and you have to do it on a dedicated host, which at Midnight Madness, we announced a new dedicated host solution that's very cloud-like. Makes it as easy to run a dedicated host instance as it is an EC2 instance. So wicked easy, very cost-effective if you're moving those on-premises workloads over. You know, I just want to point out, John, you're making something that's really important here is that a lot of times, software companies will use scare tactics to your point. They'll jack up the cost of the license to say, oh, you got to stay with us. If you run on our hardware or our platform, you pay half, right? And so then they'll put out, oh, Amazon's twice as expensive. But these are all negotiable. I've talked to a number of customers, particularly in the Oracle side of it, said, no, no, we just went to Oracle and said, look, you had a choice. Either give us the same license price or we're migrating off your database. Okay, fine. But it sort of is scare tactics. And I think, you know, increasingly that's not working in the marketplace. So I just wanted to sort of pull that out. Well, what's the strategy that customers should take? I guess that's the question because, you know, certainly the licensing becomes, again, like they get squeezed. I can see that. But what do customers do? Is there a playbook? Well, there is. And so the best one is you buy your license from Microsoft and then using BYOL, you can bring that over to AWS. It's faster, more performant, more reliable, that sort of thing. If you do get restricted though, John, like they are doing, for instance, with their end of support, you could run that on Azure and get all the security fixes. We are trying to provide technical solutions, like the ability to abstract Windows Server 2003 and 2008 as it goes out of supply. I mean, certainly in the case of Oracle, it used to be, you know, 10, 15 years ago, you didn't have a choice. You know, sort of one RDBMS. And now there's so much optionality in databases. And I will also tell you that we have a lot of customers today who are migrating from SQL Server or Oracle over to Aurora. Aurora is equally as performant and a 10th of the cost. So we actually have this team called the Database Freedom Team that will help you do that migration. In fact, I was talking to a very large customer last night and I was explaining some of the options and they're like, let's do the Aurora thing. Let's do a two-step. Let's start by migrating the database over Oracle and SQL. And then I want to go to Aurora. It's like database built for the cloud. It's faster and it's cheaper. Why wouldn't you do that? Yeah, and I think the key is, to my question is about a friction. What's frictionless? How can they get it done quickly without going through the tripwires of the licensing, you know. Certain workloads, certain workloads are tough, right? If you're running your business on a high transaction volume, but a lot of the analytic stuff, the data warehouse, you know, and if you look at Amazon's own experiences, you guys are just ticking it off, right? Yeah. And you know, moving over from Oracle to Aurora. It's been fun to watch. I want to get you guys perspective, Dave, you and Sandy, because I think you guys might have an insight on this because everyone knows that I'm really passionate about public sector. I've been really enamored with Teresa's business from day one, but when she won the CIA deal, that really got my attention. As I dug into the Jedi deal and that all went sideways, it really jumped out at me that public sector is probably the most transformative market because they're modernizing at a record pace. I mean, this is like a glacier moving market. They don't really have old ways. They got the Beltway bandits. They got old procurement, old technology, and like literally in a short period of time, they have to modernize. So they're becoming more enterprise-like and you guys have been frozen in the enterprise. What's your take? It just seems like a tsunami of change in public sector because the technology is driving it. What do you guys think about this? Am I on or off base? What are some of the trends that are going on? I mean, I have a perspective, but please. Okay, so I'll start. I see so much transformation regardless of what industry you're looking at. So if you look at government, for example, working with SAP NS2, we just actually took 26 different flavors of SAP ERP for the Navy and helped them to migrate to the cloud for the US Navy, which is awesome. Arcus Global did the same thing for the UK. We actually have Amazon Connect in there. So that's like a cool call center driven by machine learning and the healthcare system for the UK. Or you can even look at things like here in the US, there's a company that really looks at how you do monitoring for children to keep them safe. They partnered up with the National Police Association and they are bringing that to the cloud. So regardless of education, nonprofits, government, and it's around the world, it's not just the US. We're seeing these governments, education, startups, nonprofits all moving to the cloud and taking their old legacy systems to Linux, to Aurora, and moving very rapidly. And I think I'd add, I think Andy hit on it yesterday. It's got to start with top-down leadership. And in the government, if you can get somebody who's a leading thinker, CIO, says, okay, we're going cloud first, mandate cloud. You saw that years ago, but today I think it's becoming more mainstream. I think the one big challenge is obviously the disruption in defense. And that's why you talked about Jedi, the defense is very high risk and it needs disruption. It's like healthcare. It's like certain parts of financial services. They're very high-risk industries. So they need leadership and they need, you know, the best platform underneath in a long-term strategy. So, oh, Jedi actually went different. That wasn't actually the right call, but I reported on that. But I think that what gets me as a surner on stage yesterday on Andy's keynote, highlights that it's not just inefficiencies that you can solve. There's multiple win-win-win benefits. So in that healthcare example, lower the costs, better care, better, the providers are better shaped. So in government and public sector, there's really no excuse to take the slack out of the system. Yeah. Well, it's regulations though. And Dave mentioned, you know, cloud-first strategies, but we're also seeing a lot of movement around data. You know, data is really powerful. Andy mentioned this as well yesterday, but for example, in our partner keynote, where I just came from, we had on stage Avis. Now, Avis, not public sector customer, but what they're doing is the gentleman said, you know, your car can now talk to you. And that data is now being given to local state officials, local city officials. They can use it for emergency response systems. So that public and private use of data coming together is also a big trend that we're seeing. So I think this is a great example because Avis, I think we said is a 70-year-old company. I think the fleet was $18 billion fleet. So this is- 600,000 vehicles. 600,000 vehicles, $18 billion worth of assets. I mean, this is not a born-in-the-cloud startup, right, that's essentially transformed the entire fleet and made it intelligent. Right, and using data to drive a lot of their changes, like the way they manage fuel for 600,000 cars and the way they exchange that with local officials is helping them to, you know, not just be number two, but to start to take number one, right? At your point, data's at the core, right? If you're going to be an incumbent and you want to transform, you've got to start with the data. I'm seeing, I want to get your reaction to two memes that I've been developing on theCUBE this week. One is, you take the T out of Cloud Native and it's Cloud Naive. The other one is, if you're born in the cloud, that's great, you're winning, but enterprises are becoming reborn in the cloud. This is the transformation, some aren't, and they're going to not have a long shelf life. So there's a real enterprise and now public sector rebirth, reborning in the cloud of a new awakening. There you go. This is something that is happening. You're an industry veteran, you've seen a lot of waves. What's the reborn, what's this getting back on the cloud really happening? What's going on? So it's really interesting because now I'm in the partner business and one of our most successful programs is called our partner transformation program. And what that does is it's a hundred day transformation program to get our partners drinking their own champagne, which is to be on the cloud. And one of the things, you know, when we first started testing it out, we didn't have a lot of takers, but now those partners who have gone through that transformation, they're seeing 70% year to year growth versus other APN partners, even though they're at an advanced layer, they're only seeing 34% growth. So it's 2x the revenue growth having transformed to the cloud. So I think, you know, back to your question, I think some of this is showing the power, like why do you go to the cloud? It's not just about cost, it's about agility, it's about innovation. It's about that revenue growth, right? I mean 2x 70% growth, you can't sneeze at that. That's pretty impactful. And you know, this really hits something, a passion for me and Dave and our team is, the impact on society, this is a real focus across all generations now, not just millennials and born in the web and older folks like us who have seen before the web. This real impact, mission driven things. This is the tech for good, shaping technology for good, educate you guys have. This is a big part of what you guys are doing. Absolutely. This is one of the reasons why I really wanted to come work in the public sector because it's fun helping companies make money and we still do that, but it's even better when you can help them make money and do great things. So you know, working with the Mayo Clinic, for example, or some of these nonprofit hospitals so that they can get better data. The GE example that Andy used yesterday, that data is used in public sector. Doing things like, I know that you guys are part of repower tech. We brought 102 underrepresented minorities and women to the conference and I have to tell you I got goosebumps when one person came up to me and he said, it's the first time he stayed in a hotel and he's coming here to enhance his coding and he said, you don't realize when I go back to my country, you will have changed my life and that's just like, don't you get goosebumps from that versus it's great to change a company and we want to do that, but it's really great when you can impact people in that form or faster. And the agility makes that happen faster. It's a communal activity, tech for good is there. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, we just announced today, right before this in the partners session, that we now have a public safety and disaster response competency for our partners because when a customer is dealing with some sort of disaster or emergency, they need a disconnected environment for long periods of time. They need a cloud solution to rally the troops. So we announced that and we had 17 partners step up immediately to sign up for that. And again, that's all about, you know, giving back, helping in emergency situations, whether it's Ebola in Africa or Hurricane Doreen, right? Well, Sandy, congratulations. Not only you have seen your leader for AWS doing a great job. Thank you. Such a great passion and women in tech, underage minorities, you do an amazing job on tech for good. Thank you. Well, it's such an honor to always be on the show too. I love what you guys do. I love the memes. I'm going to steal them. Can I ask you another question? Absolutely. For your wrap. You've had an opportunity to work with developers. You've experienced other clouds. Now you're at AWS in a couple of different roles. Can you describe what's different about AWS? Is it cultural? Is it the innovation? I mean, what's tangible that you can share with our audience in terms of the difference? I think it's a couple of things. The first one is the way that we hire. So we hire builders. And you know, it really starts from that hiring. I actually interviewed Werner the other day and he and I had a debate about can you transform a company where you have all the same people? Or do you need to bring in some new talent as well? So I think it's the way we hire. We search for people who not only need the leadership criteria, but also our builders, our innovators. And the second one is, you know, when Andy says we're customer obsessed, we're partner obsessed, we really are. We have the mechanisms in place. We have the product management discipline. We've got the process to learn from customers. So my first service I launched at AWS, I personally talked to 141 customers and another 100 partners. So think about that, that's 250 customers and partners. And at most large companies, as a senior executive, you only spend about 20% of your time with customers. I spend about 80% of my time here with customers and partners. And that's a big difference. Well, we look forward to covering the partner network this year. Awesome. You're amazing. We'll see Teresa Carlson on the cube here at 330. Oh, great. We're going to ask her some tough questions. What should we ask Teresa? What should you ask Teresa? Where did she get those red pants? She's amazing. Again, we totally believe what you're doing. We love the impact. Not only the technology advancement for modernizing public sector across the board, but there's real opportunity for the industry to make shape technology for betterment. And you're doing a great job. Thank you so much. Thank you. I think we should start another hashtag for the cube too, which is technology for good. Awesome. What do you think? I love that. John has been doing a lot of work in that area. I know he has. That's why I knew he would love that. We love it. Hashtag tech for technology for good, tech for good. This is the cube here live in Las Vegas for reInvent. I want to thank Intel and AWS. This is the big stage. We have two stages without sponsoring our mission. We wouldn't be here. Thank you AWS and Intel. More coverage after this short break.