 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit Online. This is their virtual conference, Public Sector Summit. It's the big get together for Theresa Carlson and her team in Amazon Web Services around the public sector, which includes all the government agencies as well as education, state and local governments here in the United States and also abroad for other governments and countries. So we're going to do an analysis of Theresa's keynote and also summarize the event as well. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. I'm joined with my co-host of theCUBE, Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman. We're going to wrap this up and analyze the keynote summit. A really awkward, weird situation going on with this summit because of the virtual nature of it. This event really prides itself, Stu and Dave. We've all done this event. It's one of our favorites. It's a real good face-to-face environment, but this time is virtual. And so with the COVID-19, that's the backdrop to all this. Yeah, so, I mean, a couple of things, John. I think first of all, as you've pointed out many times, the future has just been pulled forward. I think the second thing is with this whole work from home and this remote thing, I mean, obviously everybody's talking about how the cloud is a tailwind, but let's face it, I mean, everybody's business was affected in some way. I think the cloud ultimately gets a tailwind out of this, but I think the third thing is security. Public sector has always heavily focused on security and the security model has really changed overnight to what we've been talking about for years that the moat that we've built, the perimeter, is no longer where organizations need to be spending money. It's really to secure remote locations and that literally happened overnight. So things like a security cloud become much, much more important and obviously endpoint security and other things that we've talked about in theCUBE now for the last 100 days. Well, Stu, I want to get your thoughts because we all love space too. We always want to go to the best space events and they're going to be virtual this year as well. But the big news out of the keynote, which was really surprising to me is Amazon has continued to double down on their efforts around space, cyber security, public, and within the public sector and they're announcing here in the big news is a new space business segment. So they announced an aerospace group to serve those customers because space is becoming a very important observational component to a lot of the stuff we've seen with ground station. We've seen it reinvent also public sector. These new kinds of services are coming out. It's the best of cloud. It's the best of data and it's the best of these new use cases. What's your thoughts? Yeah, interesting, John. Of course, the federal government has put together Space Force is the newest arm of the military. It's real even though something is a punchline. There's even a Netflix show that I believe got the trademark for it because they registered for it first. But we've seen Amazon pushing into space, not only their technology being used. I had the pleasure of attending the Amazon Remar show last year which brought together Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin as well as Amazon AWS in that ecosystem. So AWS has had a number of services like ground station that are being used to help the cloud technology extend to what's happening in space. So it makes a lot of sense for the GovCloud to extend to that type of environment. As you mentioned at this show, one of the things we love always is there's just some great practitioner stories. And I think so many over the years that we've been doing this show. And we still got some of them. Teresa had some really good guests in her keynote talking about transformation. I actually, one of the ones that she mentioned but didn't have in the keynote was one that I got to interview. It was the CTO for the state of West Virginia. If you talk about one of those government services that is getting heavy usage, it's unemployment. So they had to go from, oh my gosh, we normally had people in physical answering the phone call centers to wait, I need to have a cloud-based contact center. And they literally did that over the weekend, spun it up and pulled people from other organizations to just say, hey, you're working from home. You can't do your normal job. Well, we can train you real quick. We can get it to you securely. And that's the kind of thing that the cloud was really built for. And this new aerospace division day, this is really highlights a lot of not just the coolness of space, but on earth the benefits are there. And one of Amazon's ethos is to do the heavy lifting. Andy Jassy told us on theCUBE, it can be more cost effective to use satellites and leverage more of that space perimeter to push down and look at observation. Cal Poly's doing some really interesting work around space. Amazon's worked with NASA, Jet Propulsion Labs. They have a lot of partnerships in aerospace and space and as it all comes together because this is now an augmentation and the cost benefits are there, this is going to create more agility because you don't have to do all that provisioning to get this going. This has spawned all kinds of new creativity, both in academic and commercial, your thoughts. Well, you know, remember when the first, the cloud first came out, people talked a lot about, wow, I can do things that I was never able to do before. You know, the New York times PDF example comes to mind. But I think what a lot of people forget is, you know, they'll point to, oh wow, a lot of these mission critical application, you know, Oracle databases aren't moving to the cloud. But this example that you're giving in aerospace and ground station, it's all about being able to do new things that you weren't able to do before and deliver them as a service. And so to me, it shows great example of TAM expansion and it also shows things that you never could do before. It's not just taking traditional enterprise apps and sticking them in the cloud. Yeah, that happens. But it's reimagining what you can do with computing, with this massive distributed network. And then, you know, IOT is, you know, clearly coming into play here. I would consider this a kind of IOT-like, you know, application. And so I think there are many, many more to come, but this is a great example of something that you could really never even conceive in enterprise tech. Before. Dave, the line on that, you talk about IOT, we've talked a lot about edge computing. Well, if you talk about going into space, that's a new frontier of the edge that we need to talk about. Well, Stu, the world is not flat. It's round so there's technically no edge if you're in space. So again, not to get, you know, nuanced here and nerdy, but okay, let's get into the event. I want to hold on to the analysis of the keynote because I think there's some really society-impact, public service, public sector things to talk about. But let's just do a quick review of kind of what's happened and we'll get to the event. But let's just review the guests that we interviewed on theCUBE because we have theCUBE virtual. We're here in our studio as you guys are in yours. We've got the quarantine crews. We're still doing our job to get the stories out there. We talked to Teresa Carlson, Shannon Kellogg, Ken Eisner, Sandy Carter, Dr. Poppa, Casey Coleman from Salesforce, Dr. Sheldjitamin from the Farragon Institute, which is doing the Farragon Islands research around space and weather data. Joshua Spence, Matthew Coneos with the Alliance for Digital Innovation around some of this new innovation. We lead the Children's National Research Institute. So a lot of great guests on theCUBE.net, check it out. Guys, I had trouble getting into the event. They're using this Intrado platform and it was just so hard to navigate. They've been doing it before. There was some keynotes on there. I thought that was a disappointment for me. I couldn't get to some of the sessions I wanted to. But overall, I thought that the content was strong. The online platform just kind of wasn't there for me. What's your reaction? Well, I mean, it's like, that's the state of the art today. And so it's essentially, webinar-like platforms, and that's what everybody's saying. A lot of people are frustrated with it. I know I as a user, it's like too many clicks to find stuff, but it is what it is. But yeah, I think the industry can do better. Yeah, just a comment I'd make on it, John. You know, one of the things I always love about the Amazon show is not just what AWS is doing, but you walk the hallways and you walk the exo. So in the virtual world, I walk the exo floor and it's, okay, here's a couple of presentations and links and an email address if you want to follow up. I felt even that the previous AWS online had a little bit more there. And I'm sure Amazon's listening, talking to all their partners and building out more there because that's definitely a huge opportunity to enable both networking as well as, you know, having the ecosystem be able to participate more fully in the event. And full disclosure, we're building our own platform. We had a platform. So we care about this. Guys, I think that on these virtual events, the discovery is critical, having the available to find the sessions, find the people. So it feels more like an event. I think, you know, we hope that these solutions can get better. We're going to try and do our best. So we'll keep plugging away. Guys, I want to get your thoughts, Dave, you've been doing a lot of breaking analysis on this too in your interviews as well on the technology side around the impact of COVID-19. When Teresa Carlson and her keynote, her number one message that I heard was, COVID-19 crisis has caused a imperative for all agencies to move faster. And Amazon has kind of, I won't say put things to the side because they got their business at scale, have really been honing in on having deliverables for crisis solutions, solving the problems and getting out to Steve mentioned in the call centers is one of the key interviews. This is their job. They have to do this. COVID impacts the public services of the public sector that they service. So what's your reaction is because we've been covering it on the commercial side. What's your thoughts of Teresa and Amazon's story today, Dave? Yeah. Well, she said, you know, the agencies started making cloud migrations at a record pace that they'd never seen before. And having said that, you know, it's hard, right? Amazon doesn't break out its revenue in public sector. But in the data that I look at, you know, the breaking analysis, the ETR data, I mean, it definitely suggests a couple of things. One is, I mean, everybody in the enterprise was affected in some way by COVID, as I said before. It would surprise me if there wasn't a little bit of a pause in AWS's public sector business and then it, you know, picking up again now as we sort of exit this isolation economy. I think the second thing I would say is that AWS public sector based on the data that I see is significantly outpacing the growth of AWS overall. Number one, number two, it's also keeping pace with the growth of Microsoft Azure. Now we know that AWS on balance is much bigger than Microsoft Azure in infrastructure as a service, but we also know that Microsoft Azure is growing faster. That doesn't seem to be the case in public sector. It seems like the public sector businesses is really right there in terms of growth. So it really is a shining star inside of AWS. Speed is a startup game and agility has been a DevOps ethos. You couldn't see a more obvious example in public sector where speed is critical. What's your reaction to your interviews and your conversations and your observations of the keynote? Yeah, I mean, something we've all been saying in the technology industry is just imagine if this had happened 10 or 15 years ago, where we would be. So where in a couple of the interviews you mentioned, I've talked to some of the nonprofits and researchers working on COVID-19. So the cloud really has been in a spotlight. Can I react fast and I scale? Can I share information fast while still maintaining the proper regulations that are needed in the security? So the cloud has been reacting fast. When you talk about the financial resources, it's been really nice to see. Amazon in some of these instances has been donating computational resources and the like so that, you know, critical universities that are looking at this and researchers can get what they need and not have to worry about budgets. Other agencies, if you talk about contact centers, often they will get emergency funding where they have a way to be able to get that to scale since they weren't necessarily planning for these expenses. So, you know, what we've been seeing is that cloud really has had the stress pass with everything that's been going on here and it's reacting. So it's good to see that, you know, the promise of cloud is meeting that scale. For the most part, Amazon doing a really good job here and, you know, their customers just, you know, feel the partnership with Amazon is what I've heard loud and clear. Well, Dave, one of the things I want to get your reaction on, because Amazon, you can almost see what's going on with them. They don't want to toot their own horn because they're the winners on this pandemic. They are doing financially well. Their services, all the things that they do scale. They're positioned to take advantage business-wise of the remote workers and the remote customers and agencies. They don't have the problems at the scale that their customers have. So a lot of things are going on here. These applications that have been in the IT world of public sector are old, outdated and antiquated. Certainly some are modernized more than others, but clearly 80% of them need to be modernized. So when a pandemic hits like this, it becomes critical infrastructure because look at the things. Unemployment checks, massive amount of filings going on. You got critical service front education, remote workforces. These are all exposed. It's not just critical infrastructure is plumbing. It's the applications are critical. Legit problems need to be solved now. This is forcing an institutional mindset that's been there for years of like slow to got to move fast. I mean, this is real, your thoughts. And well, with the liquidity that the Fed put into the market, people had, you know, it's interesting. When you look at, say for instance, take a traditional infrastructure provider like an HPE or Adele, you know, very clearly their on-prem business deteriorated in the last 100 days. But, you know, HPQ and well, HPQ had some supply chain problem, but Adele, big uptick in its laptop business. Like Amazon doesn't have that problem. In fact, CIOs have told me I couldn't get a server into my data center. There's too much of a hassle, too much time. It didn't have the people. So I just spun up instances on AWS. At the same time, you know, Amazon's VDI business, Workspaces business, you know, no doubt, you know, saw an uptick from this. So it's got that broad portfolio. And I think, you know, people ask, okay, what remains permanent? And I just don't see this productivity boom that we're now finally getting from work from home pivoting back to go into the office. And it calls into question SD-WAN if nobody's in the corporate office, you know, the VPNs, you know, the internet becomes the new private network. Stu, startups moving fast. The change has been in the past two months has been like two years, huge challenges. Yeah, John, it's an interesting point. So, you know, when cloud first started, it was about developers, it was about smaller companies, that the ones that were born in the cloud. And the real opportunity we've been seeing in the last few months is, you know, large organizations. You talk about public sector, you know, there's nonprofits, there's government agencies, they're not the ones that you necessarily think of as moving fast. As Dave was just pointing out also, many of these changes that are putting into place are going to be with us for a while. So not only remote work, but you talk about telehealth and telemedicine. These type of things, you know, have been, you know, on our doorstep for many years, but this has been a forcing function to have it be there. And while we will likely go back to kind of a hybrid world, I think we have accelerated what's going on. So, you know, there is the silver lining in what's going on because, you know, number one, we're not through this pandemic and number two, you know, there's nothing saying that we might have, you know, another pandemic in the future. So if the technology can enable us to be more flexible, more distributed, as I've heard online, people talk a lot. It's no longer work from home, but really work from anywhere. So that's a promise we've had for a long time. And in every technology and vertical, there's a little bit of a reimagining and cloud is absolutely an enabler for thinking differently. For John, I wonder if I could comment on that and maybe ask you a question if that's okay. I know you're a host, but you don't mind. So first of all, I think if you think about a framework for coming back, as Stu said, you know, we're still not out of this thing yet, but if you look at three things, how digital is an organization? How, what's the feasibility of I'm actually doing physical distancing and how essential is that business? From a digital standpoint, if you don't have cloud, you know, how digital are you? The government obviously is a critical business. And so I think, you know, AWS public sector and other, you know, firms like that are in a pretty good shape. And then there's just a lot of businesses that aren't essential, that aren't digital. And those are going to really, you know, see a deterioration. But you've been interviewing a lot of people, John, in this event, you've been watching for years. What's your take on AWS public sector? Well, I'll give an answer. And then also wants to do away because he and I both talked to some of the guests and interviewed them and had some conversations in the community as prep. But my takeaway looking at Amazon over the past, say five or six years, a massive acceleration we saw coming in that matched the commercial market on the enterprise side. So there's almost blending of, it's not just public sector anymore. It looks a lot like commercial because the needs and the services and the apps have to be more agile. So you saw the same kind of questions and the same kind of criteria. It wasn't just a separate division or separate industry sector. It has the same patterns as commercial. But I think to me, my big takeaway is that Teresa Carlson hit this early on with Amazon. And that is they can do a lot of the heavy lifting, things like Fed ramp, which can cost a million dollars for a company to go through. You go on with Amazon, you onboard them. You're instantly, there's a fast track for you. It's less expensive, significantly less expensive. And next thing you know, you're selling to the government. If you're a startup or a commercial business, that's a gold mine. I'm going with Amazon every time. And the other thing is that the government has shifted. So now you have COVID-19 impact. That puts a huge premium on people who are already been setting up for digital transformation and or have been doing it. So those agencies and those stakeholders will be doing very, very well. And you know, like Congress has got trillions of dollars, Dave, we've covered this on theCUBE. How much of that coverage is actually going for modernization of IT systems? Nothing. And you know, one of the things Amazon's saying, and rightfully so, Shannon Kellogg was pointing out, Congress needs to put some money aside for their own agencies because the citizens, the taxpayers, we got to get the services. You got veterans, you got unemployment, you got these critical services that need to be turned on quicker. There's no money for that. So huge blind spot on the whole recovery bill. And then finally, I think that there's a huge entrepreneurial thinking that's going to be a public-private partnership with Cal Poly, other NASA, JPL. You're starting to see new applications. And this came out of my interviews on some of the ones I talked to. They're thinking differently. They're doing things that have never been done before and they're doing it in a clever, innovative way. And they're reinventing and delivering new things that are better. So everything's about, okay, modernize the old and make it better. And then think about something new and completely different and make it game-changing. So to me, those are dynamics that are going on that I'm seeing emerge. And it's coming out of the interviews loud and clear. Oh my God, I never would have thought about that. You can only do that with cloud computing. A supercomputer in the cloud, analytics at scale. Ocean data from sales drones using satellite over the top, observation data. Oh my God, brilliant, never possible before. So these are the new things that put the old guard and the Beltway bandits at check because they can't make up the old excuses. So I think Amazon and Microsoft, more than anyone else, can drive change fast. So whoever gets there first will take most of the shares. So it's a huge shift and it's happening very fast more than ever before this year with COVID-19. And again, that's the analysis. And Amazon is just trying to like, okay, don't talk about us cause we don't want to look like we're overtaking the world because outside, outside they look opportunistic but the reality is they get the best solution. So. Well, they don't blame them. They don't want to be perceived as ambulance station. But to your point, the new workloads and new applications, the traditional enterprise folks they want to pave the cow path is really what they want to do. And we're just now seeing a whole new set of applications and workloads emerging. What about the team? You guys have been interviewing a lot of people. We've interviewed tons of people at AWS re-invent over the years. We know about Andy Jassy and all his lieutenants. How about the team in public sector? How do they compare relative to what we know about AWS and maybe even some of the competition? Where do you grade them? I give Amazon a much stronger grade than Microsoft. Microsoft still has old DNA. You got Satya Nattel in there which brings some fresh of brand in there. I see the Jedi competition. A lot of mudsling in there. And I think Microsoft's clearly got an inferior solution. So the whole stall tactic has worked and we pointed that out two years ago. The number one goal of Jedi was for Amazon not to win and Microsoft looks like they're going to catch up and we'll probably get that contract. And I don't think Microsoft probably is going to win that outright. I don't think Amazon's going to win that back. We'll see. But still, it doesn't matter. It's going to go multi-cloud anyway. Theresa Carlson has always had the right vision. The team is exceptional. Their superb experience and their ecosystem partners are second in the NASA, JPL, Cal Poly, the list goes on and on. And they're attracting new talent. So you look at the benchmark, new talent and unlimited capability. And again, they're providing the kinds of services. So if we wanted to sell the cube virtual platform, gave, say, the government to do events, we had to get FedRAMP. We did all these approval processes. But because Amazon customer, you can just skate right in and move up faster versus the slog of the certifications that everyone knows and every venture capitalist or investor knows, it takes a lot of time. So to me, the team is awesome. I think they're the best in the industry. And they got to balance the policy. I think that's going to be a real big challenge. And it's complex with Amazon. They own the post. You got the political climate and they're winning, right? They're doing well. And so they got an incentive to be in there and shape policy. And I think the digital natives are here. And I think there's a silent revolution going on where the young generation is like, look at government, serve me better. And how can I get involved? So I think you're going to see new apps coming. I think you're going to see a real, integration of new blood coming into the public sector, young talent, and new applications. That's my take. You mentioned the political climate. Of course, pre-COVID, you heard us all that, we call it the tech lash, right? The backlash into big tech. You wonder if that is going to now subside somewhat because Stu, as the point you were making it, where would we be without technology generally and big tech stepping up? Of course now there's, you know, who knows, right? Biden looks like he's, you know, in the cat bird seat, but there's a lot of time left talking about Liz Warren, being the treasury secretary, you know, what she'll do to big tech. But nonetheless, I think really it is time to look at big tech and look at the tech for good and, you know, give them some points for that. Stu, what do you think? Yeah, first of all, Dave, you know, in general, it felt like that tech lash has gone down a little bit. When I look online, Facebook, of course, is still front and center about what they are doing and how they are reacting to the current state of what's happening around the country. Amazon, on the other hand, you know, as John mentioned, you know, they are absolutely winning in this space, but there hasn't been, you know, too much pushback. If you talk culturally, there's a big difference between Amazon and AWS. There are some concerns around what Amazon is doing in their distribution facilities and the like. And, you know, there's been lots of spotlights set on that. But overall, you know, there are questions, should AWS and Amazon, could they split? There's an interesting debate on that. Dave, you and I have had many conversations about that over the past couple of years and it feels like it is coming more to a head. And if it happens from a regulation standpoint or would Amazon do it for a business reason? Because, you know, one of Microsoft and Google's biggest attacks are, well, you don't want to put your infrastructure on AWS because Amazon, the parent company, is going to go after your business. I do want to pull on just one thread that John, you and Dave were both talking about. While today, you know, Amazon's doing a good job of not trying to, you know, ambulance chase. What is different today than it was 10 or 20 years ago, it used to be that IT would do something and they didn't want to talk to their peers because that was their differentiation. But Amazon has done a good job of explaining that you don't want to have that undifferentiated heavy lifting. So now when an agency or a company find something that they really like from Amazon, they're talking to all their peers about it because they're like, oh, you're using this. Have you tried plugging in this other service or use this other piece of the ecosystem? So there is that flywheel effect from the cloud, from customers. And of course, we've talked a lot about the flywheel of data. And one of the big takeaways from this show has been the ability for cloud to help unlock and get beyond those information silos for things like COVID-19 and beyond. Hey John, if the government makes AWS spin out or Amazon spin out AWS, does that mean Microsoft and Google have to spin out their cloud businesses too? And you think the Chinese government will make Alibaba spin out its cloud business? Well, you know, the thing about the Chinese and Facebook, I compare them together because this is where the tech-clash problem comes in. The Chinese stole an electrical property from the United States. That's well-documented and used as competitive advantage. Facebook stole all the electrical property out of the humans in the world and broke democracy, right? So the difference between those bad tech actors is in Amazon and others is one's an enabling technology and one isn't. Facebook really doesn't really enable anything if you think about it. It enables hate and enables some friends to talk, some emotional reactions, but the real societal benefit of historically, if you look at society, things that we're enabling do well in free societies. Closed systems don't work. So you got the country of China who's orchestrating all their actors to be state-driven, have a competitive advantage, just subsidized. The United States will never do that. I think it's a shame to break up any of the tech companies. So I'm against the tech-clash breakups. I think we should get behind our American companies and do it in an open, transparent way. I think Amazon's clearly doing that. I think that why Amazon's quiet is because they're not taking advantage of the system. They do things faster and cheaper. That's their ethos, things benefits the consumer if you think about it that way. And some will debate that. But in general, Amazon's an enabling technology with cloud. So the benefits of the cloud for them to enable are far greater than the people taking advantage of it. So if I'm an agency trying to deliver unemployment checks, I'm benefiting the citizens at scale. Amazon only takes a small portion of that fee. So when you have enabling technologies, that's how, to me, the right capitalism model works. Silicon Valley and the tech companies, they don't think this way. They think for profit, go big or go home. And this has been an institutional thing with tech companies. They would have a policy team and that's all they did. They didn't really do anything to impact society because it wasn't that big. Now with networked economies, you're looking at something completely different, a connected system. You can't handle dissidents differently. It's complex. The point is, the difference between Facebook and Amazon is one's an enabling technology, AWS, Facebook is just a walled garden portal. So, you know, I mean, some tech is good, some tech's bad. And a lot of people just don't know the difference. What we do, I would say that Amazon is not evil, Amazon Web Services in particular, because they enable people to do things. And I think that benefits far outweigh the criticisms. So- Well, anybody can use AWS, right? Anybody can go in there and swipe the credit card and spin up, you know, compute, storage, AI, database, you know, services- Well, they can solve the problems. I mean, the problems, whether it's COVID problems on solving the unemployment checks going out or serving veterans or getting people, getting delivering services, some entrepreneur can develop an app for that, right? So, you know, there's benefits, right? So, you know, it's not Amazon saying, do it this way. They're saying, here's this resource, do something creative and build something, solve a problem. And that was the key message in the keynote. People get concerned about absolute power. You know, it's understandable, but if you, you know, if you start of using absolute power, I really, I've always believed the government should come in. But you know, the evidence of that is pretty few and far between. So, we'll see how this thing plays out. I mean, it's a very interesting dynamic. I mean, my point about why should, I don't understand why AWS, you know, gets all the microscopic discussion, but I've never heard anybody say that Microsoft should spin out Azure. I've never heard that. Well, the big secret is Azure is actually one of Amazon's biggest customers. Really? That's for another breaking analysis. Look into that, look into that. We'll keep making a note of that. Dave, Stu, thanks for coming. Stu, great interviews. Love your conversations. Final words, Stu, I'll give you, what's the big thing you took away from your conversations with your guests for this CUBE virtual coverage of public sector on virtual summit? So, biggest takeaway from the users is being able to react, you know, just ridiculously fast. You know, talk about something where, you know, I get a quote on Thursday, on Friday, I make a decision, and on Monday, I'm up and running. This is just unparalleled that I wouldn't be able to do before. And if you talk about the response to things like COVID-19, enabling technology to be able to cut across organizations, across countries, and across domains. John, as you pointed out, that public, private, dynamic, helping to make sure that you can react and get things done. Awesome, we'll leave it there. Stu, Dave, thanks for spending time to analyze the keynote, also summarize the event. This is Ada's public sector virtual summit online. Couldn't be face-to-face. Of course, we bring the CUBE virtual coverage as well as content and our platform for people to consume. Go to thecube.net, check it out, and keep engaging, hit us up on Twitter. And if any questions, you know, hit us up. Thanks for watching.