 Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit here in Washington, D.C., our nation's capital. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside John Furrier. We are welcoming back to theCUBE an esteemed CUBE veteran, Teresa Carlson, Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector AWS. Thank you so much. Thank you. Really appreciate always being on theCUBE and I appreciate you being here at our Public Sector Summit. Well, thank you for having us. So give us the numbers. How many people are in this room? How many people are here? Well, we have now to date, well, for this time that we're here, there's probably about 13,000 people here. We'll expect a couple of thousand more. I think by the time it's all said and done, we'll have about 15,000 at the conference. Of course, you had my keynote today with a whole bunch of sessions that were all packed and tomorrow you'll have Andy Jassy here with me doing a fireside chat at 11 o'clock on Wednesday. So I think that room will be overflowing with Andy coming as well because everybody loves him. And Andy just is coming back from a conference for the Silicon Valley elites on the West Coast where he put a big plug in for Public Sector, which is awesome because now there, you guys are kicking some serious butt. Congratulations. Thank you. It's been 10 years. Yeah, thank you. I mean, what's it like for you? You're the leader, you're the chief of the Public Sector business. You've grown it. It's now cruising altitude. I'd say still cruising up. Yeah. Well, first of all, none of this would have been possible without Andy Jassy actually kind of believing in the mission of Public Sector when he hired me in 2010. And you're right, John. We started, you've kind of heard the story. We started with two people in 2010 at the end of 2010. And now we have thousands of people around the world in over 35 countries, customers in 172 countries. And the business is growing at more than 41% every year at AWS and we're a $31 billion business with Public Sector being an important component of that business. So for us here today, it is very meaningful. And the reason it is so meaningful, it is about our customers. And this is a testament to that our customers love what AWS provides. And in the Public Sector business, it is a game changer to their mission. We were talking on our intro this morning, Rebecca and I around this new generation of workers. And it's almost like a revolution of, hey, red tape, why is it in the way? We got to do better. The ways can be managed with cloud, healthcare. You name the vertical, there's an opportunity to disrupt, create value. So you have this kind of shift happening, but you guys are also technology leaders. So when you see things like space, these are kind of tell signs that the CIA adopting, the DOD, looking at the big contracts are coming in, people are working at heart. These are tell signs that the growth is real. Yeah, the growth, the action to that. The growth is real and I like to talk to my leaders about why we've had phenomenal growth and that's fantastic. We really are only getting started because now in 2018, I really saw our customers doing unbelievable workloads, very hard mission critical workloads that they were moving from a kind of old environment, moving it on AWS, migrating it and totally optimizing it. Now what's changing within the intelligence community and DOD is that you know in 2013 when the IC made this decision to move, it started changing even enterprise views of moving to the cloud from a security perspective. But how that shift has happened now, you see DOD moving toward Jedi, which will be announced hopefully in July or August, hopefully soon, but even without Jedi, DOD is making massive moves to the cloud. I mean, and by the way, there are no blockers now. Like a year ago when we talked here, there were still some blockers for them. Today really pretty much every blocker has been removed so that they can move a lot faster. So even outside of Jedi, we see our DOD customers moving. You heard Kenny Bowen today on stage, who's the CAO of the Special Access Program, talk about what they're doing and why cloud became an important element of their mission. And I can tell you Kenny works on some very challenging and difficult mission programs for DOD. So these are kind of examples. On the flip side, I met with some CAOs yesterday from the state and local government. Now that has been a super surprising market for me where I'm seeing them actually, 2018 was a true change of year for them. Massive workloads in the state, Medicaid systems that are moving off of legacy systems on AWS, justice and public safety systems moving off on AWS. So that's where you're seeing moves, but you know what they shared with me yesterday? And my theme as you saw today was removing barriers, but they talked about acquisition barriers still. That states still don't know how to buy cloud and they were asking for help. Can you help kind of educate and work with our acquisition officials? So it's nice when they're asking us for help in areas that they see their own blockers. So what accounts for the fact that these blockers are sort of disappearing? As you set up on the main stage this morning, cloud is the new normal. Everyone is really adopting this cloud-first approach. And what accounts for the fact that these challenges are sort of slowly dissipating? Well, some of the blockers have been very legacy and I like to tell everybody that kind of the old guard helped create a lot of these models. And most of these models as an example of acquisition were created so that governments had to pay upfront. So these models were like, pay me a lot of money upfront and then let's hope I will use all that technology. So now we come along and say, actually no, you don't need to pass anything upfront. You can try it and pay as you use it and then scale that. And they're like, wait a minute, we don't know how to do that model. So part of these things have been created because of old systems. But what's changing those systems is that you can't, again, if you can't change gravity and we're at the point where it is a new normal and you cannot change gravity and they're seeing security, if you think about security as the number one reason they're moving to the cloud, once you start having security issues, they on their own start removing blockers because they're like, we've got to move faster because we want to be more secure. Chris, I know you got a lot of things going on. You got customer visits, your time's very tight. Appreciate you coming on, but I got to get in there. I want to talk about tech for good, the programs you launched, what happened at the breakfast of the stories. We could probably go for an hour on that alone. It's going to be awesome. But I really want to dig into this ground station thing. It's one of the coolest things I saw it reinvent when it kind of got launched. This is literally, it reminds me of the old Christopher Columbus days. Is the world flat? Is the edge flat? Well, no, the world is round. You have space. Space and data is going to change the IoT edge to be the world. So this is a game changer. I see it as a game changer. We had your GM on earlier, Brett. What's going on with ground? So how is that going to help? Because it's almost provisioning backhaul. It's probably going to help certainly rural areas, state and government, uplink, downlink. What's going on with ground? We had our earth in space day yesterday. So we kicked off with that two amazing speakers. And the reason ground station is so important, by the way, it was a customer of ours in the US intelligence community that told us about six years ago we needed to create this. So, you know, where I said 95% of our services are customer driven, it was a customer that said, why doesn't AWS have a ground station? And we really listened to them work backwards and then we launched ground station. It became general availability in May. And that is really about creating a ubiquitous environment for everyone for space, for the space and satellite communications. So you can downlink and uplink data. But then the element of utilizing the cloud to process and analyze that data in real time and be able to have that wherever you are is really, I mean, it truly is going to be an opportunity for best commercial enterprises and public sector customers. And, you know, John right now, the pipeline that we have seen already for ground station, even I'm surprised at how many of our customers and partners are so interested with us and doing this. government's thinking about like traffic lights, IoT sensors now backhauling all that into a global cloud, just like a mind blower, there's so many different. And we announced, I don't know if you saw, we announced with the cloud innovation center at Cal Poly, we're going to be doing some research with them on space, communications and programs around ground station. Chile is another location you've heard me talk about that has the most telescopes in the world. And we're going to be working in Chile, doing some work on ground station there in the Middle East. So this is by the way, global. While the, it kind of came to us. So you're not going to go to Cal Poly, check out Cal Poly and then Chile, we're going to go to Chile. Yeah, yeah, let's go to Chile next. Yes, yes. Chile is great. So you can go to both locations with me. I would love that. We'll have some wine here next week. Exactly, I love it. Yes. Theresa, thank you so much for. Come back and make sure we get all this other data. Yes, because next time I've got to tell you the tech for good. There's too much not to talk about. So we have to convene again. Come to your office in the next couple of months this summer. I'll make a trip down. We'll come in. Thank you all for being here. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks so much, Theresa. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. Stay tuned. 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