 Live from Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit, Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Bahrain for theCUBE's exclusive coverage here in the Middle East for AWS Amazon Web Services, new region being announced and being deployed early 2019. I'm John Furrier, your host. Our next guest is Paseel Hamad, assistant professor information systems at the University of Bahrain. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me and welcome to Bahrain. It's been a great pleasure. Our team has been blown away. It's been a very surreal experience. We're really excited. We learned a lot and we're super impressed with the people in the culture. Yeah, thank you very much. It's a Silicon Valley vibe. It's got community, it's got money, and it's got now an ecosystem that's going to be flourishing. It really looks really good. Yes, yes, hopefully we'll have, as I told you, we'll have the little desert circle valley soon, inshallah. Now, Silicon Valley, I wanted to bring this up because one of the big success stories of Silicon Valley is it let the innovation flow. They have soil and they feed it with money and things grow and the entrepreneurs are out there making things happen. But they have two universities. You got Stanford and University of California, Berkeley. Of course you got UCLA and Southern California. So research is really important and also the role of academia is really important. Not in the sense of like just being too hardcore but creating a ground for free thinking, entrepreneurship, and then as the kids come out of school, sometimes dropping out, they just want to start companies. All right, this is big. How are you guys looking at this massive wave of innovation coming? Because it's got to be taking you by surprise. You got the old way to get the computer science, here's some IT, like, oh my God, here comes cloud. All these new languages, data science. It didn't take us by surprise, if you'd say. We were been expecting this change for quite some time. The thing is with the leadership of the government of Bahrain as well as with the leadership of the university, they want to make sure that we are able to produce talents to the economy. And Bahrain, the University of Bahrain was involved from the early on steps in the cloud first initiatives or cloud first policy. So we were aware that we have to change the ways that we operate in order for us to produce these, to not produce them, but to shape these talents in order for the students to compete, not just locally, but internationally. So you've seen it coming, okay, that's fair. But the wave is here and there's multiple waves coming in. It's going to be a 20, 30 year generation of waves. So you got to get the surfboards to use the metaphor from California. Sorry, I'm from California. There's no waves in the desert. The water is 91 degrees. But as a metaphor, I mean, this is what's happening. So how is that shaped some of the curriculum, some of the interactions? Certainly the Economic Development Board, the EDB, has been gung ho supporting this entrepreneurial resources. So when you're going to come in and you're going to be feeding the young kids the nutrients, what are you giving them? New languages, new IT, what's the plan? Let me just try to focus the discussion on the university and what the university is doing. So what we are doing here at the university now, we have partnerships with AWS and now University of Bahrain is an AWS Accredited Academy. So we now provide curriculum that is aligned with AWS so that when our students take these courses, they will be able to take the certification and then be certified upon graduating. So in that sense, we're providing the talent and trained talent to start working immediately with limited or lower training needed. As well, in terms of research, if you would say, it used to take us a long time if you want to research something. We need, if you want, for example, the data centers, if you wanted, let's say, for example, some experts in artificial intelligence, it would take us a long time and a lot of effort to do so. But with AWS, all you need to is just log into the console. Amazon is doing all the research for you, they got all the tools. Yeah, so if a student is, or even a researcher is interested in, let's say, for example, artificial intelligence, instead of waiting for the instructor to be knowledgeable, waiting for an instructor to be knowledgeable about that part, they could just start plugging in and playing with it. And then with that experimentation, they can do a lot of great stuff. Yep. Yeah, what about software? Let's get back to software. I want to get to the IT in a second that I know information technologies in your wheelhouse. But software is driving a lot of the DevOps and the cloud-native IT disruption. Amazon is now winning a lot of that business. That's the main Amazon web services. But they started with developers. So that's where the software developers are. How is that developing in the university? Are people taking to software programming? What's the curriculum like? So what's the story? Yeah, so we're not going to just focus on creating a curriculum for cloud computing. Cloud computing now is embedded throughout all the curricula that we have in the university. So in any, let's say, program, whether it's in IT or even arts, as well as business, there's a small component of cloud computing telling them what is cloud computing and what can it provide for them? So you're focusing on cloud first? Yes, cloud first. And then we have these courses designed especially for IT students. As I told you before, we are partners with AWS, with the AWS Academy. So now we'll be able to provide a curriculum that's actually updated by AWS. And all we have to do is just deliver this. How long have the courses been out there? Are they released yet? Are they been out there for a while? They just has been released and we have almost 50 students now taking these courses. Well, you know, a university of California in Berkeley where my daughter goes, the number one class is Intro to Computer Science and Intro to Data Science. It seems that the younger kids that want that intro to programming and intro to data science. Is there any data thing going on with Amazon? They do a lot of big data. You got Redshift, Aurora, you got IoT. SageMaker, one of the most popular features of Amazon is like, I think it's going to be the most popular, but... So in our department, for example, the Department of Information Systems, instead of just having a bachelor's in Information Systems, now we have smaller tracks within the program itself. So if the student is, let's say he's interested in cloud computing, then he can take the cloud computing track and take all these cloud computing components apart of the curriculum. If he or she is interested in, let's say, big data, we have a big data track within our program. And the government's really behind you on this, right? Yes, yeah. The government is behind us in the way that they want students not just to rely on having to secure a white collar job. They want them to create the jobs for others. They're trying to create this culture of entrepreneurship. So you start your own business, you don't have to wait for opportunities, you make your own opportunities. With the help I think of Temke, EDB, all of them are giving them the platform to just flourish, to just go into the world and then create opportunities, not just for themselves, as I told you, but for others. So final question I want to ask you. Okay, personal opinion, what do you think's going to happen with after the Amazon region gets deployed? You're going to get these training classes, people are going to be coming into the marketplace, graduating, what's the impact? What's your vision? What's my, I don't know. Any guesses? You had to kind of project and connect the dots. I think there's going to be a huge move towards towards a small business because it used to cost a lot. Opening a business or starting a startup used to cost a lot. Now it doesn't cost that much if they choose, let's say for example, cloud computing, or if they choose AWS in particular. It's just going to cost them the operational expenditures. There's no capital, a huge capital expense that they have to put in place. So my projection is that we're going to see a lot of small businesses, more newer apps and newer ways to go around business because of these opportunities offered by. It lowers the bar to get a new innovation going. Yeah. And certainly it costs less than provisioning servers. Exactly. So if a company wants to start up a business, if it's a small business, they don't have that much time to spend on servers, spend on many. Well, Vasil, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. What's going on in the university when we come back? We'll certainly be back here in the future covering you guys. There's certainly a lot of action Dubai right around the corner. This is a new hot area for innovation for theCUBE covering our first time here. We're excited. I'm John Furrier. You can reach me on Twitter at Furrier, F-U-R-R-I-E-R or find me anywhere online. All my channels are open. Stay with us for exclusive coverage of AWS's new region here in Bahrain. Be right back.