 Hello, and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards Program. This session's award is going to be profiling the most customer obsessed mission-based win in the education domain. I'm your host, Donald Klein, with theCUBE. And today we are joined by Fernando Castillo. He's the business development manager at Cloud Hicev. And then also Luis Munoz, who's the information director at the Universidad de Los Logos. Okay, everyone, welcome to today's session. All right, look, Fernando, thanks for taking some time out and joining us today. Wanted to start with you and wanted to hear a little bit of background about Cloud Hicev, obviously you're a company that had won an award last year, but you're back on this year again. Why don't you give us a little bit of the story about Cloud Hicev and what kind of services you provide? Galaxy, muchas gracias, Donald. Thank you very much, Donald. Yes, Cloud Hicev is a managed consulting service provider in the cloud. We are a AWS partner and set 2014 providing solutions focusing on security, trustability, and scalability in the cloud. We accompany companies with the main objective, which is reducing operational costs and increasing their productivity as they move forward in the adoption of cloud services. Very good, okay. And then Luis, I'm going to turn to you now. Once you talk to us a little bit about your role there at the Universidad de Los Logos and how you started this project. Hola, buenas tardes. Good afternoon. I belong to the academic department of the engineering department of the University of Los Logos, and I've been the director of the IT of the school. For several years, for about five years, we've been analyzing the deployment of these affirmation universities of Chile since it's not a common item in the country. We've done several benchmarks worldwide, especially in Spain, Mexico, or Colombia, and places where it's more developed. And eventually we had to take some demos that allowed us to make some decisions. This topic was not going to be considered in 2020, but it happened because of a political situation, social political in Chile in 2019. So we had to move forward the process, but we had already made a global analysis. And this was one of the reasons why we had to get closer to AWS partners. And this allowed us to move this process forward within the university. Okay, very good. All right, well then, what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna come back to you, Fernando, and I want you to talk a little bit about the overall goal of what you were trying to help the university with. Claro. Buenas tardes, te cuento que dentro de los... Well, within the main objectives we had in the project was to have a platform that would support a concurrent load of thousands of students, especially in University of Los Lagos, they had requested to have around 15,000 students. And the main complication or the main challenge was to keep virtual attendance, which is not known as learning management system, but also having the possibility of having video classes in two days, something similar to what we are doing today, but with 50 or up to 100 students, this was one of the main objectives of the project. Okay, understood. So the goal is here to deploy this platform and open source platform and make it available for about 15,000 students, okay? Now, coming back to you, Luis, there was a time constraint here, correct? You needed to get this system going very quickly. Maybe you could explain why you needed to accelerate this program so quickly. Literalmente... Well, literally, the pandemic conditions in the country started to be more evident and more severe since the first week of March, since 2020. And so we had to make the decision, the double-sided decision of choosing an infrastructure that we could not buy at that time, given the emergency, logistic emergency, of the pandemic at the server's room, and to keep a stable platform for that number of users, students, and professors at the university. So we started conversations, so we had to make the scale up and move everything to the cloud. This was the first decision, so we decided to use Amazon and with Cloud Heasive, we were able to organize the academic structure in the same platform, so as to move no longer than three weeks so that we could give classes, online classes with the students while we were learning this new normal, which was virtual distance education. This was very difficult, of every morning, afternoon, and evenings of work, but this allowed us not to fall behind in the first semester of the educational needs of the students. With this modality, we have around 5% more students that we used to last year in 2020, in March 2020. And this allowed us to have a more visible structure for those who were questioning this new modality, and we were obliged to take this new modality in the end. Okay, so because of the pandemic, you had to accelerate the deployment of this learning management system very quickly, and you had to learn how to manage the system at the same time that you were deploying it, okay? Understood, so a lot of challenges there, all right? So then maybe coming back to you, Fernando, why don't you talk about your role and how Cloud Heasive helped with this sort of, this very rapid deployment of this LMS system? Well, talking about the challenges and how we were able to get to the objective, within the plan of deployment and development, we had to accompany the University of Los Lagos, not only with the use of the platform, but also how to change management. One of the biggest challenges was to do security audits, employment of scalable infrastructures, and one of the main topics was one of the main challenges for Cloud Heasive that we can now talk about and attain objective was to do the tests from the point of view of scalability and security, getting to 15,000 students, concurrent students, stimulating the workload of the University, keeping 99.5 availability of the platform. So going back to the challenges, it's not only the scalability and feasibility. Nowadays, the University of Los Lagos platform can continue to grow, as Luis mentioned, without the need to look for new resources, but with our implementation, deployment and development, they already have a scalable resource as they increase the number of professors and students to their university. Okay, understood, understood. Now, maybe talk a little bit just to continue with that point. Maybe talk for a minute about how you leverage the AWS platform in order to be able to accelerate this project. What aspects of your partnership with AWS enabled you to deploy the system so quickly? Hablando particularmente de ese punto, nosotros nos basamos. Talking about that, we based on a referential architecture of AWS, which is an open source middle platform, and within those competencies, and within, since they belong to the education, we also have the presence of divorce, which allows us to deploy new solutions and new integrations. So this allowed us as a team to, within weeks, to develop new features that would allow us to deal with each of the requirements of the university specifically. So within the first week, the University of Los Lagos had the connectivity with the academic sector. On the second week, they had the infrastructure to support two-way videos. And on the third week, they already had the platform completely deployed with all the security safeguards that we already have in all of our products and services. So having worked hand in hand with AWS allowed us to have success in time with this platform. Wow, so that's fantastic. You were able to deploy this entire system from the connection with the academics to the video infrastructure to actually getting all the security implementations in place. You were able to do that in a three-week cycle. Is that correct? Yeah, it's not correct. Fantastic. Okay, so Louise, coming back to you then. So working with Cloud Heasive as a partner to help deploy the platform on AWS gave you fantastic speed and agility to get the system working. Maybe talk a little bit now about the challenges of getting students and educators to adopt the system and what kind of successes you had. First of all, they had to... We need to need the geography, the landscape of the university. The geography is very varied. We have mountains and lakes and so forth and connectivity concepts are very difficult in this area. In addition, University of Los Lagos has the characteristic of receiving students from very poor sectors within the region. So this means that more than 80% have a free education as long as there are very few universities that don't exist in the country. So one of the technological challenges was for these students to receive the mechanisms and technology to have the connectivity they needed. After that, we had a very big training plan with the deployment company, Cloud Heasive, with the technicians. And eventually, together, we were able to go beyond students and professors. And I remember we had 50% students and professors logged into the platform and nowadays we have 100% students and professors logged in, having classes in the platform. But most importantly, nowadays we have an analytical control because of an integration with Cloud Heasive with certain tools that allow us to gather data in real time and we can do a follow-up of the student that is closer actually from the previous situation when we didn't have this technology. If the student is not logged in, we can reach them directly or indirectly to know what is happening, what he's needing, which is the kind of support, academic, social, or economic support that they need. Before this, it was harder to get this. So we have a communion between technology and social services that we can provide as a university. And of course, the adaptability of Cloud Heasive in as much as most of the requirements that we needed so as to have a good response, they've been very providing, they provided a very robust service in these terms. Fantastic. So you were able to reach 100% of your target audience very quickly. Is that correct? Great. And maybe just to kind of follow up one more, just talk a little bit about the future of your program. Now that you've worked so hard to establish this system and to connect your students and your teachers and to optimize the system, what is your plan to use it going forward? Are you looking to expand it? What would you say are your goals? First of all, for better or for worse, this morality came here to stay. The pandemic may end, but it generated opportunities that nationwide, it moved forward at least seven or eight times faster, these kinds of possibilities. So it's hard to lose or waste this opportunity with face-to-face classes. The university nowadays, thanks to the platform and the work done by Cloud Heasive and AWS, the university won ministry projects from the Ministry of Education in the country having strengthening plans for other kinds of services that were not incorporated before, like the idea of a virtual library, research work, academic development work, training and cultural transformation as well. But eventually they are happening in these virtual environments and the university won this possibility through the ministry, bridging the gap between the academic sector and the students, and in order to elaborate a little bit more from the previous question, we did a survey last year and did it not long ago, and most professors said that 80%, more than 80% said that the virtual environment was considered as good or very good. So we have a very good assessment in order to participate in these projects that were won by the university, and they are nowadays being applied. So this generates development in the academic sector in research, in library, in content creation, global communication, working together with other universities too, with post-private courses and other universities, with that the need of getting out of home. So this is a very competitive advantage that we didn't have before, and since 2020 we were able to develop. Fantastic. Well, congratulations on a really well put together program, and I'm excited to hear that you've won an award in your country and that you're planning to expand the system more broadly. I think that's a fantastic success story. So maybe just to wrap this up here with you, Fernando, why don't you talk a little bit about, you know, so obviously you guys were very critical in helping this system be deployed very quickly, but very securely at the same time. What do you see this, how do you see your role going forward in enabling these types of situations? These distance learning type formats? No, just as Luis said, taking this project with the University of Los Lagos, this showed the importance of looking at technological advances and to improve the universities and research centers and how to focus on innovation and bringing the future of education down. For us, the data generated in these virtual interactions are very valuable and having a clear perspective so as to organize this data to make more effective decisions that allow us to act in real time. This is what we are focusing on right now so as to keep and improve and being able to provide new tools to research centers and universities to operate quickly, safely, and cost-effectively. Fantastic, so really the real lesson learned here is by working with a partner like yourself, you were able to take an open source learning management system and then deploy it very quickly, manage it, and then secure it in a way that allowed the university then to do their work. I think that's a really great end-to-end delivery story. Maybe if you want to make one last comment, Fernando, about your role and any kind of future expansion for this type of work? Yes, of course. I would like to thank Amazon and University of Los Lagos, of course, for giving us the chance to work together and develop this project successfully and answering your question, I would like to say that this is a good incentive to build more robust solutions so as long as we have our focus on our clients when working and as a final comment, I would just would like to thank you and hope to see you again with a new project. Okay, well congratulations to you both on winning this award and for Cloud Heasive. This is your second year in a row of winning a public sector award. So with that, I'm going to sign off today and I'm going to thank you both for attending. Today we've had Fernando Castillo from the Business Development Manager from Cloud Heasive and then Luis Munoz, the Information Director at the University of Los Lagos. And thank you both for attending. This is Donald Klein for theCUBE. Until next time.