 Hello, everyone, welcome back to London. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. We're here in a special program that we've constructed. It's the day before the AWS London Summit, and we wanted to come and talk to some customers, some executives, some startups, and really dig into what's going on in public sector. Chris Heyman is here. He's the director of UK and Ireland Public Sector for AWS. Chris, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for inviting me. It's great to be here. So you guys have a special public sector healthcare pre-day going on downstairs. What's that all about? Yeah, so we've obviously got the main summit tomorrow, expecting about 12,000 people, which is phenomenal. Today, though, we're going to do something with one of our special industries, which is healthcare. So we've invited a number of customers and executives along for that today to learn more about the cloud, how they can get going with the cloud and get, you know, start adopting at pace. So I believe you spoke with Emiss a bit earlier on. So Emiss is a supplier to the NHS, but also people like NHS Digital and so on who are adopting the platform. So that's what today's all about. So healthcare is one of those sectors that's ripe for disruption. It really hasn't been disrupted in a big way and digitized and it's starting. But the challenge is how do you balance the cost of healthcare? Everybody's sensitized to that with the quality of care. And so that's what really the problem that you're trying to solve. How does AWS and the cloud help solve that problem? Yeah, I think across the public sector, really not just for the healthcare, but one of the things organizations are trying to do is reduce that large legacy footprint of infrastructure and really deliver against their mission, whether it be patients or citizens or whatever it may be. A good example in the case of the healthcare is we're working with a part of the NHS called the Business Services Authority. And they have a large call center and that was a really costly experience having traditional call center set up. So they've used our Kinect platform, our call center platform, and also some voice technology called Lex. And they're able to reduce, they stood up in about three weeks. It was a phenomenal effort and they reduced their call volume by 42%. So basically getting the computers to answer some of the really easy queries, which of course meant that some of the tougher call center queries went to the actual humans and the call center handlers. So, you know, those sort of things, I really think impact the bottom line for the NHS and save some cost, but really help them to innovate as well for their patients and citizens. So. Let's stay in healthcare for a second. So NHS has a nearly half a billion pound initiative to modernize. So had they asked me, they didn't ask me, but had they asked me, I said, well, part of that should be to get rid of the heavy lifting, move to the cloud and then really try to transform your labor force to focus on more value-added areas. Yeah, exactly. This helps us solve real problems. Is that essentially what's happening? Yeah, 100%. So the context in query, you know, that the people that are now answering the phones aren't doing those sort of mundane queries where it's going to take four to six weeks. It's more transferring that to the computer and letting the humans do the heavy lifting. So I think that's certainly one thing. But I think it's also enabling these organizations to really be closer to their citizens and to their patients as well. If we look at organizations like in the local authority space, like Altsbury Vale, they're also using voice technology with Alexa to enable citizens to answer queries like, you know, who is my counselor or to update various things within their sort of council record. And so obviously public sector organizations love that because they've now got this unique touch point with the citizen at scale, whereas they would never have been able to do that previously. So that's a kind of a really good, you know, close engagement for them. See here, the bromide, people say data is the new oil. It's the new natural resource. We actually think data is more valuable than oil because you can only use oil in one place, you know. Data you can use many, many places. So data becomes increasingly important. But the problem that most traditional companies have is their data is locked in silos. It's hardened into an application. And so how are you guys attacking that problem? What do you see as trends in the customer base in terms of being able to have sort of a unified data model and what role does the cloud play there? Yeah, I think it's a really good question. So there's a number of things that we're doing. First of all, we're very passionate about public datasets. So we host a number of public datasets like Landsat imagery and these sort of things. You know, fundamentally we believe that data has gravity. So you know, if we're able to host and provide this data at scale for researchers and so on, that has tremendous huge benefit. But you're right about public sector organizations and those silos. A good example where we've worked is with Transport for London. Obviously, if you want to get in and around the city of London, typically you go to tfl.gov.uk, which runs on AWS. And you'll say, right, I want to get from, you know, Farringdon to Liverpool Street. And that's all kind of running on top of AWS. But the really cool thing is they've opened up all that information. So they don't have to develop those apps themselves. They're effectively crowdsourcing the development of those apps. So they've got some 4,000 developers now working against all this data. Deloitte recently did a study. They reckon it's going to generate economic benefits of 130 million pounds per annum just by making this real-time data available. So you're gaining unique business insights. But not only that, you've got organizations like CityMapper who can commercialize that data, develop apps and sell those apps on behalf of, you know, to the community and so on. So you've got that double bubble of SME engagement, but also the public benefit as well. So it's really cool. Now, years ago, in the past life, I had an opportunity when I worked for IDC, the research company, to run the government business. And when I went around and talked to the heads and military heads, the heads of agencies, there was a common theme. They were trying to close the gap between public sector and commercial. And they never quite could get there. The cloud seems to me, Chris, to be changing that. I mean, to me, the CIA deal in 2013 was a seminal moment for just the cloud and AWS specifically. But increasingly, you're seeing innovation. It's still very difficult because you get turnover and agencies and administrations and so forth. But what are you seeing in terms of those trends? Are you seeing public sector organizations leaning in, modernizing, and again, what role does the cloud play there? Yeah, 100%. I think you're absolutely right. It is a unifier in that sense. We worked with, we're moving mission systems to the cloud now with our customers. We worked with Driver Vehicle Standards Agency, so they're responsible for making sure our cars are roadworthy in the UK. They migrated their entire platform, which supports some 30,000 small businesses to AWS in 10 weeks. So it's amazing what public sector organizations are able to achieve with the pace of the cloud. And a lot of it starts with experimentation. That's the great thing is that you can try something. If it doesn't work, you can turn it off and you haven't lost anything. But that pace of being able to move, even mission systems to the cloud is happening in public sector across the board. And I mentioned the CIA before. Sorry to be the American sort of parachute. It's obviously a bias that I have. I'm working on my accent. But the CIA was significant because everybody in the early days are so concerned about security. The head of IT from the CIA stood up last year at the DC Public Sector Summit and said, my worst day of security in the cloud is better, far better than my client server ever was. So what about security concerns? Have they abated? Are they still there? How is that evolving? Well, I think, first of all, it's absolutely right that public sector organizations are 100% laser focused on security. But the good news is that we are too. It's job zero for us. It's absolutely everything that we do and live and breathe by. And I think we've demonstrated that in a number of ways. I mean, first of all, just the way in which we operate our physical infrastructure and everything that we do at a physical pace. But then above the layer, the kind of things that our customers are responsible for, we have something called a shared responsibility model. So their responsibility for kind of everything above the physical infrastructure. But we provide the tools that they just never would have been able to get access to in a physical world. I'd ask CIOs in public sector organizations, do you know every server that you have? Just things like that and they'll just be like, no, I've got no idea. But with the cloud, you have that visibility. You can see every single thing that's happening in the environment. So you get far more visibility and control that you ever were able to in a physical world. So I think that's the first thing. And obviously everything that we do around certification, attestations around ISO certification, all the reporting and so on that we do to assure our customers that we do a good job at that level as well. Ministry of Justice actually came out and said, you can be more secure in the cloud than on premises. And you have to focus on those areas where you're not in the cloud. So I think that was a huge testament by the UK government to say, actually this is secure and this is fit for purpose, which is good. One of the other things I've observed about just technology adoption in general, Silicon Valley is unique, obviously. But outside of Silicon Valley, maybe technology adoption 20 years ago occurred more slowly. It seems like cloud adoption is very much consistent across the globe. I wonder if you could talk about that, but then specifically public sector adoption of the cloud. Do you see this very similar sort of cadence from US, rest of the world? Yeah, I do and I think we're doing a fantastic job in the UK actually, really fantastic job. I talked about some of the stuff we're doing around AI and machine learning. Some of these things are really leading edge and if you spoke to EMS earlier, they're investigating things like blockchain for their types of solutions. So these sort of things are really pushing the boundary but paramount to all of that is this idea that you can experiment and try things. So there's no longer a disparity around these sort of things. Fundamentally, when you log into the console, you've got access to 165 different things and you can get going whether you're in the UK, whether you're in Canada or in North America. So our customers are picking these things up and accelerating your pace, which is fantastic, trying all different types of things and workloads. Okay, if I were to ask Alexa, what's going to happen with Brexit? What would it tell me? Well, I think first and foremost, the way we think about it is it's just business as usual for us. It's a fairly mundane answer, but fundamentally, organizations still need to adapt, they still need to transform, they still need to evolve and that's where we're helping and we're leaning in. We're helping them with some of their EU exit programs around tooling and processing and things like that, but they're still keen to adopt cloud at pace, which is awesome. So come back to the session that you guys are running downstairs. I saw some sort of descriptions of it and I think there were three areas of focus, the public payers, the healthcare providers and the publicly funded research organizations is kind of what you guys are focused on today. So maybe close there and give us a vision for where you see AWS public sector in the UK and Ireland going. I think we're obviously healthcare is a really fast-growing vertical for us, which is fantastic, but across the board, demand has never been greater, which is phenomenal and we're really pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved. I talked about some of the public sector organizations we're working with, but partners like EMIS, but also small businesses as well. It's a great example, working with a company called Adzuna, which provides job search functionality. They run on AWS and they won a contract for Job Center Plus, which is part of our department of work and pensions. So it's not just the direct engagement we have with our customers, but it's also all the partners that we're working with to enable that end-to-end functionality, which is really good. So we're doing lots of work in that space and I can see more and more organizations, not just customers, end customers, but also partners, technology providers coming to talk to us and then across the spectrum in healthcare, whether it's suppliers to the NHS or at the NHS themselves and individual trusts and hospitals and so on that are kind of using our technology. So it's a real broad mix and spectrum of adoption. Outstanding, Chris, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. We're seeing the growth of AWS is actually astounding. 30 billion dollar run rate company growing at 40 plus percent a year. But more importantly, you're starting to see not only region expansion, but you're seeing expansion into specific verticals and ecosystems forming startups and you guys are doing a great job of attracting these. So thanks very much for coming on. I appreciate it. All right, keep it right there everybody. This is Dave Vellante on theCUBE. We're right back right after this short break.