 From Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Imagine, nonprofit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're on the waterfront in Seattle. It's an absolutely gorgeous couple of days here at the AWS Imagine nonprofit conference. We went to the AWS Imagine education conference. This is really all about nonprofits and we're hearing all kinds of interesting stories about how these people are using AWS to help conquer really big problems. And we're going to shift gears a little bit from the two-footed problems to the four-footed problems. And that's animals that everybody likes animals, but nobody likes animal shelters and nobody likes the ultimate solution that many animal shelters used to use to take care of problems. But thank you to our next guest. That is not quite the case so much anymore. So we're really happy to have Angie Embraion. She is the CIO of Best Friends Animal Society. Angie, great to see you. It's great to see you as well and thank you for having me. Oh, absolutely. So before we got on, I just heard this crazy, crazy statistic that when your organization started in 1984, approximately 17 million animals were killed in US shelters per year. That number is now down to 700,000. That is a giant, giant reduction and yet you, with big audacious goals, really are looking to get that to zero. So that's a giant goal. Give us a little bit of background on the organization and how you decided to go after a goal like that and some of the ways that you're actually going to achieve it. Well, the organization started in 1984 and it started with a group of friends in Southern Utah who decided that the killing in America's shelters just had to go. So really the Best Friends founders started the no kill movement along with a gentleman in San Francisco by the name of Rich Eppenzino and as you said, they took the killing down from 17 million in 1984 to approximately 733,000 now. The organization started as just the sanctuary. We have the largest no kill companion animal sanctuary in the country where we hold about 1,700 animals every day and we also have, knowing that we needed to help out the rest of the country, we have built life-saving centers in Houston, Texas or we're working on Houston, Texas but Los Angeles, California, New York City, Salt Lake City, Atlanta, Georgia. It seems like I've left somebody out but we have life-saving centers all over the country. So it was really, when they realized what was going on in America's shelters, you know, it was really the idea that we should not be killing animals for space. So just recently, in fact, I'll say recently but in the last few years, Julie Castle, our CEO, you know, did our moonshot, put that stake in the ground and said, we're going to take this country no kill by the year 2025. So it's super exciting. So it's really interesting because you guys are trying to execute your vision and it's easy to execute your own vision but it's a whole different thing when you're trying to execute your vision through this huge infrastructure of shelters that have been around forever. So I wonder if you can explain kind of what's your relationship with shelters that you don't own. I guess I think you said before we turn on the cameras they're affiliates. So how does that relationship work? How do you help them achieve your goal which is no kill? So we have over 2,700 network partners around the country and what we do is we help to educate them on, you know, we understand their problems. We have creative programs to solve those problems. So we help to educate them on, you know, how they can implement these programs within their shelters. We provide them grant funding. We have an annual conference every year where they can come and learn but they're really our partners and you know, we know we can't do it alone. It's going to take us, it's going to take them and it's going to take everybody in, you know, in every community to really step up and help solve the problem. Right. And what was the biggest thing that changed in terms of kind of attitude in terms of the way they have to operate the shelter? Because I think you said before that a lot of the killing was done to make room. Right. Killing is done usually for space. So what do they do now? Clearly the space demands probably haven't changed. So what are they doing alternatively where before they would put the animal down? Well, alternatively we're doing transport programs. So there are areas in the country that actually have a demand for animals. So instead of killing the animals, we put them on some sort of transport vehicle and we take them to the areas they're in demand. We also do what's called a trap neuter return program. So one of the biggest problems across the country are community cats. So those, a lot of people call them thorough cats but they're community cats. And usually have a caretaker. But what we do is we trap those cats. We take them into the shelter, we neuter them and vaccinate them and then return them to their home. That keeps them from making a lot of other little cats. Making babies. So yeah, so cats are one of the biggest problems in shelters today because of the community cats, they're feral cats and they're not adoptable. So if we can, we don't have to kill them. We can keep them from reproducing, as I said. And then we can put them back in their habitat where they live a long, healthy life, happy life. So you said you've joined the organization about five years ago, five and a half years ago and you're the CIO, first ever CIO. So what brought you here and then now that you're here with kind of a CIO hat, what is some of the new perspective that you can bring to the organization that didn't necessarily that they had before from kind of a technical perspective? Well, what brought me here was, I never expected to be here. If you would've told me I would be the CIO at Best Friends Animal Society, 10 years ago I went and said you're kidding because I didn't really realize that there were professional positions in organizations like Best Friends. But my journey began the same as a lot of people's did. I was that little kid always bringing home animals and my mother hated it. It was always something showing up at our doorstep with me and just loved animals all my life. And as I went through college and got my degree and started my professional career, then I thought, well, I'm gonna of course have animals because I can have as many as I want now, right? So I started adopting and I didn't even realize until I was in my 30s that they were killing in shelters and I learned that in Houston, Texas when I lived there I was working for IBM at the time. And one day a lady came on the television and she said they were doing a new segment and she said we're a no kill shelter. And I thought, oh my God, if there are no kill shelters then there are kill shelters, right? Yeah, it must be the other way, right? Yeah, so to make a long story short then I started not working in animal welfare but doing more to support the movement and donating, adopting from shelters and fostering animals. And then one day I had been to best friends as a visitor vacationing in this beautiful part of Utah. But I saw the CIO position open, I said, I'm going for it. Good for you. Good for you, so now you're there. So what are some of the things that you've implemented from kind of a techie, you know, kind of data perspective that they didn't have before? Well, they didn't have a lot. They probably didn't have a lot, besides email and the obvious things. Being the first CIO, I don't know that I really knew what I was walking into at the time because, you know, I got to Kanab in Kanab, Utah where the sanctuary is the headquarters. And Kanab is very infrastructure-challenged. Infrastructure-challenged, I like that. There is one ISP in Kanab and there is no redundancy in networks. So we really don't have, you know, you come from the city and you think, you take these things for granted and you find out, oh my God, you know, what am I going to do? And Kanab is, you know, the hub of our network. And so if Kanab goes down, you know, the whole organization is down. So one of the first decisions I made was that we were going to the cloud because we had to get Kanab out of that position. And that was one of our, one of the first major decisions I made and we chose AWS as our partner to do that. So that was very, very exciting. We knew that they had infrastructure we couldn't dream of providing and, you know, and we could really make our whole network more robust. Our applications would be available and we could really do some great things. You're not worried about the one ISP provider in Kanab because there's an accident and there's a phone pole down. All right, but then you're talking about some new, some new things that you're working on and a new thing you talked about before we turned the cameras on, community lifesaving dashboards. What is that all about? Okay, so a couple of years ago, the community lifesaving dashboard is the culmination of two years of work from all across the best friend's organization, not just the IT department. In fact, it was the brainchild of our chief mission officer, Holly Sizemore, but it's really in animal welfare, there's never been a national picture of what the problem really is regarding killing animals and shelters. So we did this big- Because they're all regional, right? They're all regional shelters. They're all local community shelters, yes. So, and transparency isn't forced. So, you know, some states force transparency. They force them to report numbers, but a lot of states don't. At the state level. Yeah, a lot of states don't. So, you know, when you're killing animals and shelters, you really don't want people to know that, right? Because the American public doesn't believe in it. So anyway, we worked really hard to collect all this data from across the country and we put it all into this dashboard and it is now a tool where anybody, anybody in the public, it's on our website, they can look at it and they can see that, you know, where we're at from a national level. They can see where they're at from a state level. They can drill down into their community and they can drill down to an individual shelter. And the idea behind the dashboard is to really, is to get communities behind helping their shelters. Because it's, you know, as I said earlier, it's going to take us all. It's not only best friends and our partners, but the public plays a big part of this. Right. And so when did that roll out? What, do you have any kind of feedback? How's it working? It's working wonderfully. We rolled it out at our conference in July. Also recently, so it's pretty new, isn't it? Yeah, it's just a few weeks old. Okay. We rolled it out at our national conference and we were all a bit nervous about it, you know, especially from a technology perspective. Right, right. We knew that being the first of its kind ever in animal welfare, that, you know, it was going to get a lot of publicity both inside and outside the movement. And it's sitting on our website and, well, really pro-ancon. Right, right. But it's sitting on our website and we're like, okay, we don't know what kind of traffic we're going to get. You know, what are we going to do about this? So we spent a lot of time with Amazon prior to the launch, you know, having them look at our environment, getting advice, discussing it with them. I'm going to bring down that ISP in Utah. No, thank God, no, it wasn't, thank God we were in the cloud. And so Amazon really helped us prepare and then the day of the launch, we knew the time of the launch. So we actually had a war room set up, a virtual war room and we had Amazon employees participating in our war room. We watched the traffic and we did get huge spikes in traffic at all times through the day when certain things were happening. And I am happy to say from a technology perspective, it was a non-event because we did not crash. We stayed up, we handled all the traffic, we scaled when we needed to and we did it, you know, based virtually at the press of a button or a flick of a switch, whatever you want to say. That's what you want, right? Yeah, exactly. I was like, it'd be a good ref. No way, it's talking about you, you probably did a good job. Exactly, yeah. Good, so before I let you go, so what are some of your initiatives now looking for? You got this great partner in AWS, you have basically as much horsepower as you need to get done, what you need to get done. What are some of the things that you see kind of next? Wow. Don't give me the whole, don't give me the whole. No, I'm just going to hit on a few key points. I think, you know what, we used Amazon initially as our cloud infrastructure, but I think the biggest thing we're looking at is platform as a service. There is so much capability out there with predictive analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, AR, VR, you name it, facial recognition. So we're really investigating those technologies because we think they have, they could have a huge impact on our movement and really help us achieve life-saving. Right, right. And I think that we're starting, we have our fledgling data science program, we're using the Amazon Data Lake technology, Athena Glue, they were just telling me about data lake formation, which I just a few minutes ago emailed my data guy and said, start looking at data lake formation, you know? So I mean, we're really, really investing in the platform as a service. The other thing I see is that we're, animal welfare is sort of broken from a technology perspective and a data perspective in that we have no interoperability and we don't have the data available. So let's say you want to adopt a five-year-old animal. Well, you go to a shelter, you can't get five years of history and a five-year-old animal. So it's really starting to fix the foundation for the movement as a whole, not just best friends. So making sure that the veterinary data is there, all the data from the pet ecosystem is there. So we're investigating with AWS, they're actually coming to our sanctuary in a couple of months, we're going to do a workshop to figure out how we get, how we do this, how we really fix it so that we have interoperability between every shelter when an animal moves from shelter to rescue or whatever so that their data follows them wherever they go. So adopters are fully informed when adopting an animal. Because you're in a pretty interesting position because you're not with any one particular shelter. You kind of cross many, many boundaries. So you're in a good position to be that aggregator of that data. I don't know that we want to be the aggregator, but we want to lead the movement towards doing that. Just getting the technology players, the shelter management systems, the other people who play a role in technology for animal welfare, getting them in a room and talking and figuring out this problem is huge. And with a partner like Amazon, we feel it can be solved. Well Angie, thank you for taking a few minutes and sharing your story. Really, really enjoyed hearing it. All right, thank you so much. She's Angie. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at AWS Imagine in Seattle. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.