 Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit live in DC, we're in-person. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE. I'm here with Max Peterson, the head of Public Sector, Vice President, Max, great to see you. An in-person event. Great to be here. We're in-person and we're also live streaming. So we're here, however customers, however partners want to participate. I got to say, I'm very impressed with the turnout. The attendance is strong. People are excited to be here. We're not wearing our masks because we're on stage right now. But great turnout, but it's a hybrid event. You've got engagement here physically, but also digitally as well with theCUBE and other live streams everywhere. You're putting it everywhere. It's been a great event so far. We did a pre-day yesterday. We had great participation, great results. It was about imagining education. And then today from the executive track to the main tent to all of the learning, live streaming them, doing things in-person. Some things just don't translate. So there won't be available, but many things will be available for viewing later as well. So all of the breakout sessions. The asynchronous consumption obviously is a new normal. But I got to say, I was just on a break and I was just walking around. I heard someone, two people talking, just guys that walk past them over here. Yeah, we're going to hire this person. That's the kind of hallway conversations that you get. You've got the programs. You've got people together. It's hard to do that when you're on a virtual event. It's hard. The customers that we had up on stage today, the same sort of spontaneity and the same sort of energy that you get from being in-person. It's hard to replicate. Lisa from State of Utah did a great job. And she got an opportunity to thank the team back home who drove so much of the innovation. And she did it spontaneously and live. It's a great motivator for everybody. And then Lauren from Air Force was phenomenal. And Suchi, our Imagine Me and You artist was just dynamite. We want to unpack some of that, but I want to just say it's been a really change of a year for you guys, the public sector. Obviously the pandemic has changed the landscape of public sector. It's made it almost like public private sector. It seems like it's all coming together. Incredible business performance on your end. A lot of change. A lot of great stuff. We had customers talk today with SBA, with VA, with NASA about how they just embrace the challenge and embrace digital and then drove amazing things out onto AWS. From the VA, we heard that they took telehealth consultations. Get this, from 25,000 a month to 45,000 a day using AWS in the cloud. We heard SBA talk about how they were able to turn around the unemployment benefits programs for the unemployed as a result of the traumatic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in a matter of weeks and then scaled their systems up just to unbelievable heights as President Biden announced the news. You had a lot of announcements. I want to get to a couple of them. One of them was the health equity thing. What is that about? Take us through that announcement. So the pandemic, it was hard. It was traumatic in a lot of different ways. It also turned into this little innovation laboratory. But one of the things that it laid bare more than anything else were the inequities associated with some of these systems that had to spring into action and in particular in the space of healthcare equity. We saw simply communities that didn't have access and weren't included in the same sorts of responses that the rest of the community may have been included in. And so we launched this global initiative today to power health equity solutions. It's a $40 million program, lasts for three years and it's open to customers or it's open to partners. Anybody who can contribute to three different areas of health equity, it's people who are leveraging data to build more equal, more sustainable health systems is people that are using analytics to do a greater study of socioeconomic and social situational conditions that contribute to health inequities. And then finally, it's about building systems that deliver more equitable care to those who are underserved around the world. So just to get this right, $40 million is that going to go towards the program for three years and are you going to dole that out or as funding or is that just to fund the organization? It's actually very similar to the development diagnostic initiative that we ran when COVID hit. We've launched the program. We're welcoming applications from anybody who is participating in those three developmental areas. They'll get cloud credits. They'll get technical consulting. They may need professional services. They'll get all manner of assistance. And all you have to do is put in an application between now and November 15th for the first year. That's for the health equity. Got it, okay, cool. So what's the other news? You guys had some baseline data, got a lot of rave reviews from ACORI, I interviewed it, Constance Thompson on theCUBE earlier. That's impressive. You guys really making a lot of change. You're 100% right. Sustainability is a key issue from all of our customers around the world. It's a key issue for us, frankly, as inhabitants of planet Earth, right? But what's really interesting is we've now got governments around the world who are starting to evaluate whether or not their vendors have the same values in sustainability. And so the AWS or the Amazon Client Pledge is a game changer in terms of going carbon zero by 2040, 10 years ahead of most sort of other programs of record. And then with ACORI, we announced the ability to actually start affecting sustainability in particular parts around the world. But the key there, from what I understand, is that you guys are setting a baseline on the data. So that's an Amazonian kind of cultural thing, right? You got to measure. You can't know what you're doing. The world is full of good intentions, but if you want to drive change at scale, you've got to figure out a way to measure the change, and then you've got to set aggressive goals for yourself. That's really smart. Congratulations, that's a good move. Real quick, on the announcement at Reinvent, you've talked about last Reinvent, you're going to train 29 million people. Where are you on that goal? Well, John, we've been making tremendous progress, and I'm going to use the cube here to make a small teaser. Stay tuned for our Reinvent conference. It comes up shortly because we're actually going to be sharing some more information about it. But we've done digital trainings, self-training, online skills workshops. We just took a program called Restart, which serves unemployed or underemployed individuals. We launched that around the world, and we're really excited today. We announced we're bringing it to Latin America too. So we're expanding into Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, and Argentina. And the amazing thing about that Restart program, it's a 12-week intensive program. Doesn't require skills in advance. And after 12 weeks, 90% of the people graduating from that course go right on to a job interview. And that's the real goal, not just skills, but getting people in jobs. Yeah, the thing about the cloud, I keep on banging the drum. I feel like I'm being a dead horse here, but to level up, you don't need to have a pedigree from some big fancy school. The cloud, you can be like top tier talent from anywhere. And you heard it from some of our speakers today, who said they literally helped their teams bootstrap up from old skills like COBOL to new skills like cloud. And I will tell you, right now cloud skills are still in a critical shortage. Our customers tell us all the time they can use every single person we can get to them. I'm going to tell my son who's a sophomore in CS, I'm like, hey, work on COBOL migrations to AWS. You'll be a zillionaire. No one knows you have the passwords with the COBOL. I love that AD chassis joke from two re-invents ago. Okay, gotta ask you about the national and local governments. How they're monetizing cloud of the past 18 months. What have you seen at that level? Yeah, national and local governments, of course, were tremendously impacted first by the pandemic itself and the health concerns around it, but then all of the secondary effects, unemployment and immediately you needed to put into action unemployment benefits systems. We work with the US small business administration, 15 other states across the US, to have those systems in place in like weeks to be able to serve the unemployed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then you saw things progress to the point where we had states across the country standing up call centers on Amazon Connect. Instantly they could have a high scalable volume call center that was situated for their instantly remote workforce as opposed to their old call center technology. So across the US we saw those and in fact around the world as governments mobilized to be able to respond to citizens. But the final thing that I think is really incredible is the way that the AWS teams and partners sprung into action to work with national governments around the world. Over 26 national governments run their vaccine management scheduling systems on AWS. The largest to date being in India where in a single day the vaccine management system scheduled and conducted 22.5 million vaccinations. Which is more than the population of New York state in one day. Wow. That's good, that's great progress. I got to say, I mean that kind of impact is interesting. And we had Shannon Kellogg on earlier talking about the Virginia impact with the Amazon $220 million being spread over a few counties just in one year. The partnership between business and governments with the cloud, so much more agility. This really strikes at the core of the future of government. I think so. People have talked about private public partnerships for a long time. I'm really proud of some of the work that Amazon and the whole team is doing around the world in those types of public private partnerships. Whether they're in skilling and workforce with partnerships like eight different states across the U.S. to deliver skills training through community college based systems. Whether it's with healthcare systems like NHS or GEL over in the U.K. to really start applying cloud scale analytics and research to solve the problems that eventually are going to get us to personalize healthcare. That's great stuff. Cloud benefits are always good. I always say the old joke is you hang around the barber shop long enough, you'll get a haircut. And if you get in the cloud, you could take advantage of the wave. If you don't get on the wave, you're driftwood. And states found that out. In fact, customers who were well on their journey, they were really able to turn on a dime. They pivoted quickly. They delivered new mission systems to customers. Those who hadn't quite progressed to the same state, they found out their legacy IT systems were just brittle and incapable of pivoting so quickly to the new needs. And what we found, John, was that almost overnight a business, government, which was largely in-person and pretty high-touch, had to pivot to the point where their only interaction was now a digital system. And- They literally could have raced cars on the track like quickly. Well, we do have raced cars on the track right over here. We've got the artificial intelligence power at Amazon, deep raced right over on the track. I can see it, always a good showing. Final question, I know you got to go on. I appreciate you coming on. It's a great- It's a busy schedule. Looking ahead, what tech trends should we be watching as public sector continues to be powered by this massive structural change? Well, I think there's going to be huge opportunity in healthcare. In fact, this afternoon at four o'clock Eastern, we're talking with Dr. Shafiq Robb from WellForce. He and folks at Veterans Affairs will tell you telehealth and telemedicine are to the areas where there's still the greatest potential. The number of people who now are serviced and the ability to service a population far more broadly dispersed, I think has dramatic potential in terms of simply making the planet more healthy. Like you said, the pandemic's exposed the right path and the wrong path. And agility, speed, new ways of doing things, telemedicine. Another example, I interviewed a great company that's doing a full stack around healthcare with all kinds of home agents, virtual agents. Really interesting stuff. It is, I think it's going to change the world. Max Peterson, head of public sector. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. As always. My pleasure. Love theCUBE. We've always had a good time. Great stuff. Hey, there's too many stories. We need to know theCUBE here. So many stories here impacting the world here at the Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.