 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. And welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS re-invent 2020 virtual. This is theCUBE virtual. I'm your host, John Furrier. We are theCUBE virtual this year. Not only we're in person, but because of the pandemic we're doing the remote interviews, doing the live coverage over the past couple of weeks we'll be covering it in depth. My next guest is Lynn Martin, Vice President of Government Education Healthcare for VMware Public Sector. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. That's part of the Public Sector Day. Thanks for coming on. Thanks John, it's my pleasure to be with you today. Great to see you. Last time you were on theCUBE we were in person and DC is part of the Public Sector Summit which is the re-invent for Public Sector is what I call it. Teresa's big event, Teresa Carlson who runs AWS Public Sector. You guys are friends, you've been working together. The partnership between VMware and AWS has been so strong going back to 2016. I'll never forget when I interviewed Pat and Andy. A lot of skeptics were like, oh VMware, AWS turned out to be great move at many levels. You're in the field for VMware, driving the business. What's the update? So a couple of exciting things. The partnership has been going great. A lot of transformation work and co-innovation between the two companies from the engineering side and as you mentioned, great partnership at the Pat Andy level. And then when you take it down to the field supporting our government education and healthcare customers, great partnership with Teresa and her team. They've done a fabulous job really being at the forefront of the cloud transformation across those markets. And our partnership together is pretty exciting. We have a lot of new product announcements coming out around our government go-to-market things jointly. So it's been a busy time with COVID and a lot of opportunity for both companies to really market differentiators for some of the challenges that are unique customers face. Lynn, I want to ask you a little bit more on that piece because I know it's been interesting with the pandemic. You guys have had a nice overlay with AWS with Teresa's organization, obviously from a customer standpoint, nice fit. Okay, also with the pandemic we're seeing customers certainly doing more modern development. That's a big theme of reinvent also for VMworld few months ago as well. But the operator side of the IT piece has completely changed. I've been doing some reporting and stories around how not just the modern app side, but the IT portion operating these environments is hard with the pandemic. So you start to see that operator meets software meets cloud kind of world. Can you give your perspective of how that's impacted with the pandemic because it seems to have accelerated both IT operations in public sector and modern development of new apps and new surge. So interesting thoughts, I'd love to get your perspective. Yeah, so I would say that when you kind of look back at the beginning of 2020, I don't think any of us envisioned quite what we were going to be facing and what our customers, particularly in public and healthcare have faced. So we have customers jointly that are on the forefront of either providing civil services, national security, education to the students or commercial healthcare first responders right on the front line around patient care. And what I would say the best observation we had really early on in March was the acceleration of the digital transformation across all of those sectors. So lots of discussions have been taken place and there were a lot of projects in place that would take a couple of years to probably implement. And I think what occurred with COVID is you really had to accelerate how you were going to provide those civil services or patient care or education. And parts of that digital transformation I think we're taking for granted. So if you think of like virtual desktop technology in the education space or SD-WAN and network capability via the cloud for healthcare providers and things of that nature. So I think the portion played a bigger part in the country responded to COVID in ensuring that we could do the things we needed to do virtually and quickly and out enabled speed to market and then infrastructure from companies like VMware teamed with an Amazon will allow the acceleration for that journey. You know, the old expression necessities the mother of all invention education and healthcare in particular really were impacted. They had a pressure points to do differently things faster. I mean, education, we know what's going on there and healthcare with the pandemic. How are you managing through this? Because, you know, you had a lot of business in flight prior before the pandemic now during and you got maybe some visibility into what growth looks like post pandemic. You still got demand. So how are you managing it with from your perspective and your team? What's it like? How are you as a leader dealing with this? Because it's not like it's slowing down for you. It's increasing in demand. Yeah, so our segment was kind of on the forefront within VMware globally. We started working with different state and local governments and the federal government ahead of the closed downs, you know, in one of the major large metropolitan cities there were over a billion students that had to be able to be educated virtually and there were challenges around network capability, device capability, all kinds of things. So we've had a lot, a lot of activity and as a company but you know, my segment how to really work with corporate to kind of bend how we do business, business process rules as well to be able to respond quickly and be agile for our clients and provide different ways to support the needs of those customers. So then they could provide the kind of civil services that the country, you know, counts on them to do. So I think from the internal perspective in customer facing, we were able to flex and move very quickly. And then internally within the organization as well, I would say, you know, February to June was almost a blur. We were so busy on weekend calls and things like that, dealing with all different kinds of situations. And the organization as a whole we were able to flex and work remotely very quickly. I mean, we just used our own technology and literally upon the shutdown the only difference is where you were working from but all the tools, infrastructure and things we had were already in place. So I think from there, and then as a leader the third element I'll add is kind of the human element. I think it's given us all an opportunity to connect our teams a little bit more. You know, you have to put more effort virtually more all-hands as more one-on-ones and kind of also adapt to how they're dealing with the different personal things of educating their own children and their family or caring with elders, different types of situations as well. It's not business as usual certainly but it's, you know, challenging great leadership insight there. Thank you for sharing that. I want to get back to the cloud impact. We did an interview as part of Amazon's public sector awards program a few months ago or in late spring roughly and there was an in use case with the censure and the Canada government and the guy was kind of a, he didn't want to take side while Amazon not going to be a spokesperson for Amazon. He ended up when the pandemic hit he was so a big fan of AWS and CloudConnect as an example because he was skeptical but he saw the benefit to speed. Can you give some examples of customers that you're working with that were getting immediate benefits from cloud in the pandemic that literally made a big difference in what they did because you're seeing people highlight on, okay, a digital transformation but people want to see examples. Can you share some examples where this is where cloud helped it made a huge difference and that's an example of what we're talking about here. Yeah, so I would say an example would be at MD Anderson, the cancer Institute. They had a need to really expand the connectivity of the facility to segregate patient care and ensure that patients that already had health issues were segregated from any of the COVID patients. And very quickly, we saw them scale and extend their data center in record time. I mean, things that traditionally would have taken years were done in months. Major accomplishments in 30 days. As I mentioned, one of our large cities in the country had to really struggle with a 1.2 billion students in K through 12, many of which count on the school systems for their meals and things and how you deliver your virtual desktops in that environment. VMC on AWS for Horizon is a great example that we saw across many state and local entities in how they transform their education to those clients. And then the federal government, there's many examples across some of the larger agencies as well with VMC on AWS for both Horizon and infrastructure as well as, sometimes it wasn't one solution. They might have went AWS native for part, VMC on AWS for part and the combination of that really allowed the companies to come together and part to get things done very, very quickly. That's a great example of the VMware cloud on AWS success story. I think what's interesting and how I see you guys really doing well with Amazon and we'll get to the partnership in a second but I want to call this out because you mentioned it earlier, devices, the network. These are not usually associated with cloud, you burst to the cloud, cloud's awesome, all these utility, higher level services, DevOps, cloud native, all goodness. But when you get down to what's going on with the pandemic, it's the devices you're using, the desktops, it's the network working at home. How as much has that affected your team and your customers? Can you unpack that a little bit more? Yeah, so what I would say on that is really when you look at the VMC on AWS offerings and you take it down to an example like the Horizon platform, Horizon allows you with the VMC AWS power behind it to really present your virtual desktop on any device anywhere. And that allowed the education entities to be able to provide those curriculums to the students very quickly and not really have a big disconnect and downtime on how that was done. So I think you're kind of taking cloud classic infrastructure that you reference and then layering in those unique use cases with the VMC on AWS offerings that then can be applied or telehealth. So lots of examples across the healthcare industry with telehealth and deploying actually patient care via EMR solutions on VMC on AWS as well. So it's really taking core IT infrastructure layering on a software platform that then allows you to provide all those use cases whether it be an NYPD or the fire departments across the country or education entities or commercial patient care, things of that nature as a second layer on top of that cloud infrastructure that you think of normally. Well, Lynn, I want to congratulate you and the team at VMWare. You guys doing a great job. Like Teresa Carlson, you guys have a really good focus. You have a great understanding of how the public sector and commercial dynamics are working with cybersecurity going on all across there. And I just, you guys are in space with them. You're doing stuff on the land and the ground station all across the public sector and they need faster solutions in the cloud. So congratulations. So I have to ask you, since we're here at Reinvent, how is the relationship going? Where do you see it evolving? Now see, we talked about the pressure of education, healthcare and other areas. I mean, education is going to be rehauled. That's going to be a complete reinvention. So a lot going on. What's, give us the update. So I think that in general, the future of the public sector and healthcare space will never go backwards. And the acceleration that we've seen occur over 2020, you're going to see that accelerate as we move forward. And I think the co-innovation between Amazon and VMware, which are both innovative companies coming together to support those markets. I think we have more opportunity ahead of us than behind us. And I think when you look at just the great job Amazon has done in general, I was super excited to see Theresa pick up the healthcare sector. So we have a whole new space to work together on this year and really provide lots of exciting innovative offerings to support both patient care and pharmaceuticals, life science and our payer community across the healthcare sector, as well as some of the work we've already been doing in the public sector, but given the dynamics and the future outlook of the industry, there's going to require lots of innovation and different kinds of things to really partner together technically and aligning our go-to-market needs around primarily the customer need. So I think what's very unique about our partnership in the public and healthcare space is we focus first on the customer needs and the mission of those customers and what they need to achieve. And both companies come to the table with incredible innovation around solutions to support that market. It's a great, great partnership. I got to say from the technology standpoint, I talked to Raghu at VMware when they did this. He's like, it's a much deeper, it's a real deal. It's not just a Barney deal as everyone kind of knows, it's the old school phrase that's saying it's not really a deal. You guys are really integrated in the field and the customer activities strong. Final question for you, if you don't mind, here at Reinvent, people are remote, there's going to be three weeks, a lot of live coverage, Cube Game Day will be doing a lot of support and coverage, but for the audience watching this, what would you say is the most important story people should think about or look at harder when it comes to cloud collision in the public sector and what's going to happen post pandemic because there's going to be a new reality. There's going to be growth strategies that'll be in play. Some projects will be doubled down on, some may not continue. What's your advice to the folks watching? What should they pay attention to this Reinvent? So I think the number one thing is to really embrace the change going around you. And I think Amazon will be on the forefront of leading a lot of great innovation in that area. And it's really trying to be open-minded about how you take advantage of the things that are coming out and be able to apply that into your infrastructure. So if you look across our customer base, there's a lot to change. As you mentioned, I don't think we'll ever go backwards. And those that will be able to move forward quicker are going to be the ones that embrace the change and really lead and drive that innovation within their organization in reinventing themselves through the kinds of technology that a company like Amazon and VMware bring to the table. Great insight, Lynn. And also there's a lot of great problems to solve and societal benefits, a lot of need. And you guys doing great work. Thanks for your leadership and great conversation. Thank you. Thanks so much. Okay, Lynn Martin, head of Vice President of Global Public Sector, Government Education Healthcare. Lynn Martin, the leader of VMware's Public Sector here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.