 Hi everyone, and welcome to the CUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit live in Washington, DC, where it's a face-to-face real event. I'm John Furrier, your host. But virtual events, hybrid events, we're a hybrid event as well. We've got a great, remote interview. We've got a guest here in person, John Sankovic, president of Cloud Solutions at Smartronix, and John Brindon, who's the VP of AWS Managed Services, also known as AMS with Amazon Web Services. John and John, and three John's here. Welcome to the CUBE. Remote, in-person, hybrid. Thanks, John. Great to be on the CUBE, a long-time viewer, and I really appreciate what you do. So, John. It's super, super fun to be here remotely, but feel like I'm right there, so this is awesome. Yeah, I love the hybrid event. It's only going to get better. Next one will be in the metaverse soon, but John, on the line there, I want to ask you with AWS Managed Services, take us through what you guys are doing with Smartronix, because this is an interesting service. You guys are working together. How does that relate at the table for us? Yeah, well, you know, we're really excited about this announcement. We've been working with Smartronix since we launched AMS four and a half years ago. So, we've been able to build up working with them, you know, a huge library of automations and capabilities, and this really just formalizes that in an offer for our joint customers where we can bring the expertise from AWS and Smartronix and offer a full solution that's tightly integrated to help our customers jointly accelerate their cloud adoption as well as their operating model transformation as they start to move to more DevOps motion and they need help. We're there together to provide our expertise and make that simple for them. Well, I appreciate it. We'll call you John B, John S over here, JS, John Sankovich, tell me about Smartronix because you heard what's going on with DevOps 2.0, whole revolutions going on in DevOps. You're starting to see a highly accelerated modern application development environment, which means that the software developers are setting the pace. They're the pace car of the innovation, right? And so other teams like security or IT become blockers, not blockers, a drag, an anchor. So the shift left on security, for instance, is causing a lot of problems on the security team. So all this is going on like right now. So still, the speed is the game, what's your take? Sure, so absolutely. I think that's where this partnership really, really excels. We want customers to focus on their mission, national security, healthcare outcomes. We want them to kind of take the rest off their plate. So when you say some of the, quote unquote, blockers around security, Smartronix has invested heavily in a FedRAMP authorized platform that sits on top of what AWS has done from a FedRAMP. And so right off the bat, speed, agility, we don't want our customers spending time replicating things that we've done at scale and leveraging what AWS has. And so by kind of utilizing this joint offer, all of a sudden a big part of that compliance is taken care of. And then things like DevOps, things like SRE models that you hear a lot about, we've folded all that into this combined service offering. I know a little bit about what you guys are doing because you mentioned SRE is very cool but let's take a minute to explain what you guys are doing because you guys are on the cutting edge and solving a lot of problems from infrastructure fools around the DevOps stack. What do you guys do in the cloud services region? Sure, so I think John hit a little bit on it but we look at AMS as best in breed at scale, managing core parts of the AWS infrastructure. What Smartronix does is many times customers have some unique requirements and we take that core kind of powered by AMS and we try and fill in those kind of complementary skill sets and complementary requirements. And so something like the DevOps which is basically making sure that those people developing that software, they have also the ability to manage it and on an ongoing basis kind of run it. We develop all the frameworks and that's part of this offering to enable that. What's the solution John B because I think people have challenged but I wouldn't understand those challenges and then when they go to the external managed service what's involved, you walk us through that because I think that's important. Yeah, sure, it turns out and John nailed this one that moving to the cloud can be a big transformation for many enterprises and government teams, right? They've worked for many years and have an ecosystem in their traditional data center but when they move to the cloud there's a lot of moving pieces and so what we like to focus on is helping them with the undifferentiated aspects of safely and automating cloud operations. So working with Smarttronics allows us to take what we're doing across the infrastructure services around security, around automation, around patching, instance management, container management, all of those are undifferentiated and we lift these tasks. We find that with Smarttronics, meet expertise across the application layer, across customers' unique environments, across FedRAMP moderate, the various government standards and compliances and we think we're able to take a customer from kind of really early stage cloud experience and rapidly deploy, configure and get them into a very stable, scalable posture operationally on the cloud so that they can start to invest in their people, their skills and their differentiated applications on the cloud that really drive the differentiation in their business and not have to worry about best practice configurations and operational runbooks and automations and the latest DevSecOps capabilities that we'll pick up for them while they're training and getting their motions in place. John, as on the Smarttronics side, talk about the difference between scale, okay, which is a big issue with cloud. These customers want to have with AMS, but then you also have some scale, maybe some scale too, but highly compliant environments, regulated industries, for instance. This is the hot areas because scale is unwieldy, but if you don't want to get it, rain it in, it can be chaotic, right? So, and also regulations and compliance is a huge issue. Yeah, what we found is at times, customers look at it and they just get frustrated because it can be kind of intimidating and we as a combined team really have spent a lot of time. We have accelerators to walk customers through that process and a really flexible model. If they feel that they have a lot of domain expertise in it, then we'll just kind of be almost a supporter. Other customers look at it and say, we'd like you to take the entire patch of that compliance and so highly regulated environments, both commercial, DOD, national security, federal civilian agencies, state and local, they're all looking to this and saying, we really want someone that's been through things like the AWS Audited Managed Service Provider, things like their managed security service provider, things like FedRAMP or DOD IL-4 and 5, and I think to be honest, Smartronics has just invested heavily in that with the goal of reducing all that complexity and it's really been taken off and we really appreciate the partnership, specifically with John and the AWS AMS team. All right, so you guys, we're going to gather. What's the ultimate benefit to the customer? I can, I'll give my thing right off the bat. All this innovation coming out of AWS, it's fantastic, but only if you have the ability to take advantage of it. And so thousands of new services being rolled out, we really want customers to be able to take advantage of that and let at times us do what we do best and let them focus on their mission. And I think that's what really AWS is all about and we just feel very fortunate to be an enabler of that. John B, talk about the staffing issues too because one of the problems that we've been reporting and this has come up at every reinvest on the max petition about this as well. He promised last year he was going to train 29 million people. See how that comes out of reinvent when the report card comes back. I was kind of busting his chops a little bit there but he had a smile on his face and I think he's going to hit these numbers. A lot of times, maybe people don't have an SRE, they don't have a DevOps person or they have some staff that they're in transition or transforming, this is a huge factor. What's your take on this? Yeah, you know, that is so important. You know, as John mentioned, it's all about helping the customer's focus and their cloud talent is scarce and it's a scarce resource. And you want to make sure that your cloud talent is working on the cool stuff or they're going to leave. And as you train and skill these folks, they want to focus on what really impacts the business, what's really differentiating. You know, doing the cloud and the necessities on operations and operational tasks and sec ops and things like that. Sometimes that's not the sexiest part of the work that the customer really wants to focus their team on. So again, I think together we're able to help drive high levels of automation and really do that day in and day out work that is not necessarily the differentiator of their business and that's going to attract and keep the best and brightest minds in these customers, which allows us to help them with the undifferentiated aspects of the heavy lift. Not only is availability of people, it's keeping the people. I love that, great call out there. Okay, when does this go? When does the relationship go? You guys are partnering, the AMS is going on strong, managers is not going to go away. More many people will be using managed services. It's part of the ecosystem within the ecosystem. What's next in the relationship? I'll speak first, I'm sure you got some thoughts too, but we've got so many things on our plate around predictive operations and the predictive capabilities that we're excited about tackling together. Obviously there's all sorts of unique applications that require even deeper capabilities and working with Smartronics to help us provide even greater insight into the application layer. So I kind of see us expanding both horizontally as well as well as vertically and horizontally we've got customers looking at the edge with the outpost solutions and we can snap into those capabilities as well. So there's a tremendous amount of kind of, I'd say, vertical and horizontal opportunity that we can continue to expand in together. John, your reaction, that's pretty right on. Absolutely, I think John Bruggen really hit it and I think really machine learning, that's a big area of focus. If you look at all this data that's being collected, predictive modeling and so we have this kind of transition from a model where people were basically watching screens reacting and what the AWS MSP offer and what AMS offers is really predicting so you're not doing that, you're not reacting, you're proactively ahead of things and the honest truth is AWS is such a well-run service it just doesn't break. It doesn't break like what you see in the traditional kind of legacy infrastructure and so at times we're just continuing to climb that stack as John mentioned. You know what's really interesting is you guys are actually talking, I'm thinking myself, just go back a couple of years ago, eight years ago or so, dev ops was a bad word. Devs dominate ops through them. Now operational leverage is a huge part of this AI operations that entire IT service management is being disrupted heavily by cloud operations that also facilitate rapid development models. So again, this is like under reported but it's a really nuanced point. Hardened operations for security and not holding back the developers is the cloud scale. What's your guys reaction to that? Yeah, completely agree. I think the automation piece of things and I think customers are still going through transitions. Traditionally managed services means a big staff and it's like I said, sitting there watching screens and you flip that model where you have developers actually deploying code and infrastructure to support it. It's very transitional and very transformative. And I think that's where an offering like what we really partnered on really, really helps because at times it can be overwhelming for customers and we just want to simplify that. And as I've said, let them focus on your mission. Yeah, amen. One last question before we break because I was talking to another partner, a big partner of AWS. And we're talking about SaaS versus solutions. And sometimes if you're too sassy, you're not really building a custom solution but you can have best of both worlds with little professional services, maybe some headroom on the stack if you will and you're building solutions. So the next question is, as you guys put this cutting edge innovated solution together, how are your customers consuming it? Like what's the consumption? I'm assuming they must be happy because it's a lot of heavy lifting being taken away that they don't have to deal with. How's the contract process? Well, I think we have the opportunity we support customers in kind of all modes of their application stack. So a full stack solution, even a legacy architecture moving to the cloud requires a high degree of automation to support it. And then as those applications become modernized over time, they become much more cloud native. And at some point, they might even become a full stack SaaS offer. So many of our customers actually run their SaaS platform leveraging our capability as well. So I think it gives the customer a lot of optionality and future kind of growth as they modernize their application stack. John, your reaction to that? Absolutely. I think one of the greatest benefits is it's freeing up funds to do mission work. And so instead of spending time procuring hardware and managing it and leasing data center space, they literally have more funding. And so we've seen customers literally transform their business because this piece of it's done more efficiently and they have really excess and really additional funding to do their mission. I love the business model innovation faster, higher quality, easy, and inexpensive. That's the flywheel. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on. We've got the three John Johnson, the vice president, Cloud Solutions, that's smart Tronix. Thank you for coming on, John Brinton. VP of Amazon Web Services Managed Services also known as AWS. No, AMS, AWS. Got upside down, WM looks the same. Thank you guys for coming on. Appreciate it. Thank you, John. Appreciate it. Keep covers here, AWS Summit. We're live on the ground and we're remote. It's a hybrid event. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.