 Hey everyone, welcome to this cubes panel, Women of the Cloud, I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Our topic of building a greener future brought to you by AWS. I have three great women rock stars here with me to talk about sustainability over the next few minutes. Please welcome my guest, Maketa Salivari, sales leader, digital native business at AWS. We also have Daenerys Durand head of digital operations at Ginkgo Bioworks. And Sophia Mendelson is here as well, chief sustainability officer and global head of ESG at Cognizant. Ladies, it's so great to have you on this panel. Thank you for joining me. First question, I'll have all of you go through this. Daenerys, we'll start with you, then Sophia, then Maketa. Talk to the audience a little bit about yourselves. Give us the overview of your current role as well as what, how you're thinking about sustainability in that current role. Daenerys, take it away. Absolutely, well, hello everyone. Thank you for making me part of this panel. I'm very happy to be sharing this moment with other talented women in the cloud business. It's really an honor for me. As you know, my name is Daenerys Durand. I'm the head of digital operations at Ginkgo Bioworks. I've been at Ginkgo for nearly six years now. And I, till this day, I still find it fascinating with our mission. I find it really fascinating and exciting, which is make biology easier to engineers. That's what we strive for every day. And so what does that mean? It's like AWS, a platform for cloud services where a physical platform that can help other companies flex into hosting their R&D data or biology. And well, my role at the company is to handle the digital operations side of the house, which means I'm responsible for all the technology, whether that's physical, cloud infrastructure, or anything that makes our labs function possible. Basically every challenge that is facing us in terms of sustainability, whether that's clean water, food, air, sustainable supply chains, renewable energy, whatever you can think of, biology can contribute to make this better, to make our world more sustainable. And as we advance in our mission to make biology easier to engineer, we believe that our platform can continue to positively transform industries and help our customers become more sustainable. Fundamentally, biotechnology and our platform offers a fundamental shift in how things are made and disposed of. So in my role, my team and the organization supports every effort, every project, every program that comes to GINGO leans in that direction, making a more sustainable environment. Excellent, that's what we need so, so much. So, okay, let's go to you. Give us a quick overview, a little bit about you, about your role and how you are thinking about sustainability in your daily role. Sure, hi everyone, thank you so much for taking the time with me today. I'm Sophia Memelson, I'm the Chief Sustainability Officer of Cognizant or a Fortune 200 technology firm that helps clients move their business to the cloud and through their own digital transformation. The way I really think about sustainability in my role for my company and our clients is that we are helping our clients with their company get ready for what's going to look like a fundamentally different economy, one that has to produce much less carbon, run off new sources of energy and also be circular in terms of what we consume and how we get rid of it. This is a sea change and it's the bed of the economy that the rest of our products and services sit on. So if we start building from the ground up with systems like cloud and AWS, we're actually enabling everything else to change with us. Nice, and I'm going to follow up with you a little bit about, we know AWS has its hands in so many things, but talk to us about your role and about how you're thinking about sustainability in your day-to-day job. Yeah, absolutely, it's great to be here. So thanks so much for having me today. I'm a sales leader at AWS and I manage our digital native business team on the East Coast. So I lead a team of sellers that help our customers at AWS get the most value out of our platform. I've been with Amazon for about six years. Here at Amazon, what's really interesting is that we live and breathe our leadership principles and the guiding principle is customer obsession. And what that means to us is that we work backwards from what our customers want. And what we're learning is that customers are asking us about sustainability really more than ever before. We're hearing from customers that sustainability is a board level topic for many companies and it's actually a criteria when selecting a cloud provider. I think in 2022, for the very first time, Gartner's annual survey of CEO showed that these leaders place environmental sustainability in their top 10 strategic business priorities for the first time. So just to give kind of a real world example of something that I see around sustainability in my kind of day-to-day job, my team is very focused on helping our customers lower their AWS costs and also improve their application performance. So to meet those goals, we've been spending a lot of time talking to customers about our next generation Graviton compute instances which are really more cost effective and also offer a higher performance. But beyond just being cost effective and offering better performance, our new next generation Graviton instances are also more energy efficient. They use only 60% of the energy of our standard compute instances to offer the same performance. And that in turn influences our customers sustainability outcomes. Let's talk about now promotion. You guys have done a great job of giving the audience and the viewers an understanding of who you guys are, what you're doing. Let's talk about now from an optics perspective. McKenna, I'm glad you brought up that so many customers in every industry are have ESG and sustainability initiatives at the board level. It's becoming so standard as we see for customers to have in RFPs, for example, the only one to work with organizations that also have viable executable sustainability programs. But I'd like to know how your companies each are promoting that so that your customers, your prospects, your partners are really well aware of all of the feet on the ground from a sustainability perspective. McKenna, we'll stay with you. Yeah, absolutely. And I think what I've come to learn is that Amazon is just truly all in on sustainability. Knowing that this is a global effort, Amazon co-founded the Climate Pledge. And the Climate Pledge is a commitment to be net zero carbon across our businesses by 2040, which is actually 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement. And this isn't just something that we're doing on our own, right? We're driving this commitment outside of Amazon and the Climate Pledge now has about 400 signatories. So it's really an area where we're making this commitment and then we're also taking it to our customers and asking them to lean in as well. Beyond just the pledge itself, we announced the Climate Pledge Fund and that's going to be an initial two billion in funding which will invest in visionary companies that will help us transition to a low carbon economy. Here at AWS rates specific to Amazon web services within Amazon, we're focused on efficiency and continuous innovation across our global infrastructure. And that's as we continue on our path to powering with 100% renewable energy by 2025. And the point there that I really wanna mention is that when we continue on this path towards 100% renewable energy, AWS can also help lower our customer's carbon footprints. 451 research actually found that AWS can lower customer's carbon footprint by at least 80% compared to workloads that they might be running in an enterprise data center. Big numbers, that's big impacts. So if you talk a little bit about in our time remaining, cognizance, promotion, what are you guys doing to really let the world know what you're doing, especially from your office? Yeah, well, first we've joined the climate pledge. So thank you to AWS for raising that and forgetting it started because it really signifies to me how companies need to hold hand with their partners, their clients all the way up and down their value chain and their supply chain. And quite frankly, you say we require change. We need you to show absolute emissions reductions if you wanna be part of our value chain. And to me, that's what the AWS climate pledge represents. And when our partners like AWS shift their cloud to renewable energy, it enables us to share with our clients that we can also pass on that goodness through their value chain. We talk about this internally and externally. And let me answer that question both with the internal and external perspective. From the external perspective, it's really a two-way conversation with clients at this point. Clients are knowledgeable, sophisticated on the topic, hungry for action. So we'll proactively raise it, of course, in client conversations, but we're also seeing it at least in RFIs and RFPs. There is no getting away from this topic and I wanna emphasize that. For anyone who's still wondering if this is a fad or something that's gonna take a lot, it's not. This is a secular trend that's here to stay. And emphasizing and kind of securing the permanent nature of that trend is demand from our own associates and employees. And I know AWS uses too. The biggest thing we're doing to talk about it is training. We have launched a goal of training 100,000 of our own associates on the basics of climate and a sustainable economy. And that is how we wanna talk about it through education and knowledge. Fantastic, that's a big goal. And I have no doubt with the focus coming from your office, Sophia, that that will be accomplished. Daenerys, finishing this question with you, you've given us some great info on Ginkgo, what you guys are doing, but talk to us in a short kind of sound bite here about some of the biological sustainability programs that we can see that Ginkgo is actually delivering. Absolutely, so when talking about biological sustainable programs like Ginkgo, I'm glad that Sophia mentioned emissions reduction and because emissions reduction in energy and transportation capture headlines these days. You see the idea that we all need to be driving electric cars and stop burning fossil fuels to go around and all that's essential to reach that goal, emissions reduction, but to make it to net zero, all sectors will need to decarbonize, particularly chemicals, food and agriculture. Biotechnology, what Ginkgo offers now, offers a key tool to reduce emissions in this area, but the biology and the focus on the programs anywhere we can, we look for sustainability using far less land, water, how can we really contribute to a better world? So traditionally, when people think about biotechnology, usually you think about healthcare or pharma, but although we do contribute in those areas, we have mRNA vaccines that we have collaborated on, gene therapy, cell therapy, et cetera. We also work with companies that want our help to bring more sustainable products, whether those are products that we eat, things that we wear, beauty products, things that we hold in our hands, basically things that we use in our daily lives and reduce the reliance on extraction and fossil fuels through the programs that we provide for our customers. These bio-based processes typically are associated with far less emissions and far less land, like I said, and water use than other, than traditional processes would in that case. So we can use the ultimate renewable source, which is nature. We can use the old metal sustainable technology, which is the manufacturing platform of the world. When you look at the world around you and you look at what's outside, you plan to see and what happens, a plant is sustainably produced. We take advantage of the same power and ally with it in order to help companies across all these markets. This is the benefit that you get and how you get it when it comes to sustainability at Ginkgo. Outstanding, and we could keep going on this, but clearly what AWS, Ginkgo, Cognizant are doing from an optics perspective, from a promotion perspective, it's huge. I'm sure we are scratching the surface, but thank you lady for sharing that. I want to go in our last few minutes here and just kind of double click on AWS's partnerships with both Ginkgo and with Cognizant. So McKenna and Daenerys talk a little bit about AWS and Ginkgo together, how you're working together when it comes to this all important sustainability initiative. McKenna, go ahead, we'll start with you. Yeah, absolutely. Was really excited that DD Daenerys was able to join the panel today because prior to moving into a leadership role at AWS, actually supported Ginkgo BioWorks as their account manager. So Daenerys and I have had the opportunity to work together for several years. So excited to share just a little bit about how Ginkgo BioWorks is using AWS and then I'll turn it to Daenerys to talk about how that's driving sustainable outcomes for their customers. Ginkgo stores all of their historical genetic sequencing runs and then lab experiment data on our storage service which we call S3. Ginkgo also tracks lab samples from the IoT sensor data collected in their robotic labs. And one area that I think is really important to mention is that Ginkgo automates creating new accounts for new experiments within their foundry, their lab system and that allows them to scale up and down for every new project so that they can really quickly execute on driving those sustainable outcomes for their customers. The scalability is just a huge benefit for Ginkgo BioWorks because their business is project-based and they need that flexibility to innovate these biological breakthroughs for their customers. I'll turn it to Daenerys now to speak specifically on the outcomes. Sure, thank you, Makena. Yes, and the partnership with AWS over these last six years, six, seven years, I think, has been tremendous. We have grown our footprint in a way that I cannot imagine we have, but I couldn't have imagined that. And when we started, we have over 200 AWS accounts today, I think we're at 250 right now and more to come at the rate the company's growing. So in a way, you can think about Ginkgo like the AWS for biology just as AWS helps companies. We use the latest cloud computing. Our platform helps companies use the latest in biotechnology. So Amazon has Amazon Web Services, right? Which is an Amazon final way to externalize the processes and microservices that they were using internally and make them available to the public. That's basically the same thing that we're doing with technology. So I like to think of AWS as Beats and Ginkgo as Adams because what we run is honestly when we do the cells that we engineer, they run on code. And that code is in the form of zeroes and ones like Mitzar is in the forms of A, C, T's and G's because we decompose DNA and we actually edit it to make that code but those code changes and make it, right? The different type of functions. So we can re-engineer cells to do and bring these sustainable initiatives that our customer come to us for. So the systems and the software platform that support our fund re-operations from entirely in AWS, everything. The labs are local, they're physical, they're here. If you can see, I'm sitting here today. The fund rate is hundreds of thousands of square feet. And what you see behind me are the robotics and the automation that was referring to. And let me tell you all of that laboratory space produces an incredible amount of data. And that's very challenging. This is the challenge in the surveys that we use, the service provider that we use to analyze the data and to help us operate the foundry is AWS, right? The main reason why we went with AWS is because of flexibility. When it comes to scaling, to availability, like McKenna said, scaling is a big thing for us. Just the same way the services in AWS to scale. We also want to scale the foundry operations every year, this key for our business model. Most importantly, when it comes to efficiency, making sure that we are using cloud resources that we can throttle up and down when we need reduce the use of electricity and energy and have a higher usage rate because the resources that we are leveraging for that are running in the cloud versus having that running on-prem where you use more electricity, you have resources now that you're using all the time. And that's great. So our potential to contribute to emissions reductions, activities grows with each additional program brought into our foundry. With each program, our platform improves in every show cycle, allowing biotech to be more readily applied to complex applications for our customers. And as we scale, we'll continue to work with AWS to help our platform continue to positively transform industry and help more to become- Awesome. When you started talking DNA, you just were speaking my old language. I studied biology for a long time. So I thought it definitely seems like AWS and Ginkgo are very symbiotic on user upon there. Last question, but can I take us out, talk a little bit about AWS and cognizant, what you guys are doing better together in our last minute or so here. Yeah, thank you. The cognizant team here at AWS was nice enough to brief me on the longterm relationship. Cognizant and AWS have an 11 year relationship where cognizant uses AWS technologies and platform internally. And then also for customer facing workloads and then cognizant as one of our partners provides a range of professional and technology services to AWS, amazon.com and then also to joint customers. So further the impact of cognizant and AWS working together, our teams have actually created a solution that analyzes the environmental impact of moving applications from an on-premise data center to the AWS cloud. So I think this speaks to the stat I shared earlier, right? Where research is finding that AWS can lower a customer's workload carbon footprint by at least 80% compared to enterprise data centers. And that's an area that we're partnering with cognizant. Customers can use data from that joint solution I mentioned to really ensure the attainment of their own sustainability goals. Tremendous opportunity that all three companies are delivering to your customers, your prospects, better together is clearly I think a theme of this message. Thank you so much, all three of you for joining me talking about your roles, how you think about sustainability and more importantly, what your companies are doing together to further those initiatives. Earth Day is around the corner. I'm sure you guys have some great plans. I want to make some good plans too. Ladies, thank you. It's been such a pleasure having you on the program. Thank you for having us. Oh, our pleasure. Yeah, we want to thank you, our lovely audience for watching. You've been watching Women of the Cloud, building a greener future brought to you by AWS. I'm Lisa Martin, we'll see you next time.